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Saturday 14 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 ...
Soukup, Martha
(1959- ) US author whose work, beginning with "Dress Rehearsal" for Universe 16 (anth 1986) edited by Terry Carr, has been restricted to short stories, and who has published several stories whose surface clarity conceals taxingly insistent examinations of readerly assumptions. Soukup won a Nebula Award for Best Story for "A Defense of the Social Contracts" (September 1993 ...
Larson, Rich
(1992- ) Nigerian author, currently in Canada, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Every So Often" (dated 2011 for untraced release; in Datafall: Collected Speculative Fiction coll 2012 ebook); Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction (coll 2018) carefully assembles a further instalment of his numerous stories. He is now perhaps best known for The Violet Wars sequence beginning with Annex ...
Punchatz, Don Ivan
(1936-2009) US designer, animator and illustrator who concentrated in the latter capacity on fantasy, though he executed numerous sf covers, sometimes signing his name Don-Ivan Punchatz or just Don Punchatz. His work appeared frequently in Slick magazines like Omni, Playboy and Rolling Stone, and for such publishers as Ace Books, Avon, Dell, ...
Torday, Piers
(1974- ) UK author whose very Young Adult Near Future Dystopian Last Wild sequence comprising The Last Wild (2013), The Dark Wild (2014) and The Wild Beyond (2015) focuses on the attempts of a mute Telepathic boy and his companions to save the last animals at a time when Homo sapiens has come ...
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 ...