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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 ...
Wratislaw, A C
(1862-1938) UK member of the British diplomatic corps and author in whose comic sf tale, King Charles & Mr Perkins (1931), a Time Machine transports Perkins to Restoration England and retrieves him just before he would have been executed. [JC]
Whitehouse, J Howard
(1873-1955) UK politician, educationist, scholar and author of Visit to Utopia (1939 chap), a lightly fictionalized description – initially presented as a talk in his role as Warden to the boys of Bembridge School – of a benign Utopia where War and other evils have been eliminated through social justice, high Technology, and due attention to the beauty of the world. As a Liberal member ...
Reichert, Mickey Zucker
Working name of US medical doctor and author Miriam Zucker Reichert (1962- ), who began publishing work of genre interest with "Homecoming" for Space & Time for Winter 1989. Almost all of her fiction has been fantasy [selected titles only in Checklist]; but her ninth novel, The Unknown Soldier (1994), is an sf tale about an Amnesiac soldier whose treatment in hospital is complicated by doubts over his origins in time ...
Rocket Comics
US Comic (1940). Hillman-Curl, Inc. Three issues. Artists include Jack Alderman, Jack Cole and Maurice Gutwirth. Each issue had 7 strips plus one or two short pieces (text story and/or nonfiction). / Each issue opens with a serial, "The Runaway Rocket" featuring Rocket Riley, Prince of the Planets, employed as the pilot of Professor Sterling's experimental interplanetary rocket ships. One day the professor announces he has "discovered how to explode the ...
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 ...