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Tuesday 24 June 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Hay, William Delisle
(1853-? ) UK author and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, in New Zealand for some years, and known for writings on New Zealand matters, including Brighter Britain!; Or, Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand (1882 2vols). His first Scientific Romance, The Doom of the Great City; Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942 (1880 chap), retains interest for the vividness with which it presents ...
Valens, E G
(1920-1992) US journalist, documentary film maker and author who is of sf interest for Cybernaut: A Space Poem (1968 chap), a narrative poem set in the Near Future and eulogizing the space programme. [JC]
Sorel, Charles
(?1602-1674) French lawyer, secretary to noble houses and author whose large oeuvre contains little that might reflect an inclination toward Proto SF; the 1602 year of birth, often given, would have him publishing multi-volume novels by his late teens, and birth dates in the 1590s have been suggested. Of some interest, however, are three tales which incorporate elements of the Fantastic Voyage, generally with ...
Wallis, Dave
(1917-1990) UK teacher (after serving with the Royal Signals during World War Two) and author of four novels. Only one is sf: the near-future Dystopian fantasy Only Lovers Left Alive (1964), in which the mass Suicide of the adult population leaves teenagers on their own in what rapidly becomes an anarchic UK. The book expressed contemporary Paranoia about scooter gangs, adolescent violence, ...
Nature
Long-established UK generalist science magazine (1869-current), a nonfiction Slick now published weekly by Nature Publishing Group (a subsidiary of Macmillan). H G Wells contributed some speculative essays around the beginning of the twentieth century. Under the editorship of Henry Gee, Nature introduced a weekly series of short-short (see Flash Fiction) sf stories as ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...