SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 22 May 2022
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 20 May 2022
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Varley, John
(1947- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in August 1974 and who was soon thought to be the most significant new writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones), many of his protagonists were women (see Women in SF), and most of the stories he told were set within an ...
Cawdron, Peter
(1967- ) New Zealand-born author, in Australia for many years, whose early novels, beginning with The Road to Hell (2011 ebook), seem usually to have been self-published until the teens of the twenty-first century, most of his stories being Space Operas heavy on action, often involving First Contact. An early example, Anomaly (2011), which is set on Earth, involves the arrival of Aliens whose civilization is aeons in advance of ours; a later title, Losing Mars (2018), ...
Barnes, Colin F
(? - ) UK author whose first series, the Techxorcist sequence beginning with Artificial Evil (2012) is set in an artificial world-dominating domed City (see Keep); renamed, the essential overall story seems to continue in the Code Breakers sequence beginning with Code Breakers: Prequel (2014 chap) and Alpha (2014), placed in the same Post-Holocaust world. His second series, the City of Hell Chronicles beginning with City of Hell Chronicles Vol 1 (2011), ...
Liljencrancz, Ottilie A
(1876-1910) US author whose first novel, The Thrall of Leif the Lucky: A Story of Viking Days (1902), is a Lost Race tale set in the Arctic; two of her subsequent tales, The Vinland Champions (1904) and Randvar the Songsmith: A Romance of Norumbega (1906), similarly introduce Prehistoric SF and Nordic Saga elements into their romanticized take on the North-Eastern coast of pre-Columbian America. [JC]
Egan, Kevin
(1952- ) US author who has also written as by K J Egan and as Conor Daly, most of his work being nonfantastic. His first novel, however, The Perseus Breed (1988), is an sf tale. The disappearance of women in New York every thirty years is investigated by a professor of Psychology, who discovers that for complex reasons planet Earth has become a nursery for a Pariah Elite of resident Aliens, who regularly harvest their victims. [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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for November 1966, where much of his earlier criticism also appeared. This criticism, despite some studiously ...