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Friday 13 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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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Falls, The
Film (1980). British Film Institute. Directed by Peter Greenaway. Written by Greenaway. 187 minutes. Colour. / Perhaps the most elliptical Disaster in sf Cinema, the Violent Unknown Event (VUE) has killed an unspecified number of people and afflicted 19 million others with bizarre symptoms including physical mutation (see Mutants), recurring dreams of water, sexual quadromorphism, the spontaneous ...
Monsters and Things
Letter-size, saddle-stapled Magazine printed on newsprint-quality paper. Magnum Publications. Editor: Larry T Shaw (credited as L T Shaw). Managing Editor: M J Shapiro. Two issues, January and April 1959. / Nominally a Cinema magazine like its companion title Monster Parade, Monsters and Things contained considerable short fiction as well as some film ...
Waugh, Charles G
(1943- ) US college professor, anthologist and author, most of whose work up to 2002 – 193 titles all told – was in collaboration with Martin H Greenberg, either alone or with further collaborators. These included such "name" authors as Robert Adams, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Isaac ...
Shurkin, Joel N
(1938- ) US journalist (winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979) and author whose very Near Future medical Technothriller, Helix (1979) with Desmond Ryan, extrapolates from the real effects of Legionnaire's Disease to depict a virulent nationwide Pandemic. [JC]
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 ...