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Monday 9 February 2026
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.
Site updated on 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Huxley, Julian
(1887-1975) UK biologist, journalist and author, elder brother of Aldous Huxley, in active service during World War One. His first work of sf interest, "Philosophic Ants: A Biologic Fantasy" (read May 1922 to the Heretics Club, Cambridge; 1922 Cornhill Magazine), though constructed as an essay, intriguingly speculates on Ants' radical non-mammalian Perception of ...
McCutchan, Philip
(1920-1996) UK author, a Sandhurst attendee (though not graduate, as war service took him in 1939), responsible for work in various genres, including a number of historical adventures as by Duncan MacNeil. Of his numerous thrillers, most of which occupy territories subjacent to the James Bond books, several are sf, the majority of these in the twenty-two volumes of his Commander Shaw series, beginning with Gibraltar Road (1960) and ending with Burnout ...
Fryers, Austin
Pseudonym of Irish trade unionist, playwright and author William Edward Clery (1861-1931), in the UK from 1877, whose activism in his public life cost him more than one job for political reasons. His first novel of interest, The Devil and the Inventor (1900), bridges sf and fantasy (the term Equipoise, here normally used for works whose relationship to the genres they transact is retrospective rather than proleptic, could easily be applied to this ...
Libertarian SF
A political movement (see Politics) originating in and largely confined to the USA, libertarianism is a form of anarchism – or "minarchism", the desire for an extremely limited state – which emphasizes (nonviolent) competition rather than the voluntary cooperation proposed by the older strand of anarchist thinking, as exemplified by the writings of such theorists as Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) or, in the sf field, by Ursula K ...
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 ...