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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 ...
Bishop, Michael
(1945-2023) US author, much travelled in childhood, with an MA in English from the University of Georgia, where he did a thesis on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. He began publishing sf with "Piñon Fall" in Galaxy for October 1970, and in a short period established himself as one of the significant new writers of the 1970s. Though his early stories and novels display considerable intellectual complexity, and do not shirk the downbeat implications of their ...
Disch, Thomas M
(1940-2008) US author and poet, raised in Minnesota but for many years intermittently resident in New York where, before becoming a full-time writer in the mid-1960s, he worked in an advertising agency and in a bank; he subsequently lived (and set several tales) in the UK, Turkey, Italy and Mexico, before returning to Manhattan, where much of his significant work is set; he was the partner of Charles Naylor from 1969 until the latter's death in 2005. Disch ...
Emshwiller, Ed
Working name of US illustrator and film-maker Edmund Alexander Emshwiller (1925-1990), who frequently signed his sf artwork "Emsh", with some early-1950s interior illustrations being signed "Willer"; married from 1949 until his death to writer Carol Emshwiller, who regularly served as his model for paintings of beautiful women. He studied art at the University of Michigan, the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and the Art Students League in New York. ...
Continuous Creation
Now relegated to Imaginary Science, this was an essential axiom of the Steady State Universe Cosmology which was proposed in 1948 by Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle but increasingly superseded by the rival Big Bang theory (see George Gamow) since the late 1960s. The notion of an expanding yet essentially unchanging universe required the spontaneous ...
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 ...