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Sunday 4 October 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 28 September 2026
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May, Peter
(1951-2026) Scottish journalist, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970; resident in France from around 2000. During the first twenty-five years of his career as a screenwriter, he was involved in something like 1,000 television productions, all seemingly nonfantastic. He began to publish fiction with The Reporter (1978), which he serialized for the BBC; most of his later novels were crime thrillers, including the China Thrillers beginning with ...
Driou, Alfred
(1810-1880) French priest (apparently) and author, prolific under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms; of sf interest is Les Aventures d'un Aéronaute Parisien dans les Mondes Inconnus (1856; trans Brian Stableford as The Adventures of A Parisian Aeronaut In The Unknown Worlds 2012), though in fact the promised Fantastic Voyage of the solar system by aerostat gets no farther than ...
Gould, Steven
(1955- ) US author, married to Laura J Mixon, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Touch of Their Eyes" in Analog for September 1980, though he only began to attract wide notice with his first novel – the first volume in the Jumper sequence comprising Jumper (1992), Reflex (2004) and Jumper: Griffin's Story (2007), a ...
Ross, Olin J
(1858-1941) US author of The Sky Blue: A Tale of the Iron Horse and of the Coming Civilization (1904), in which, by virtue of railroads (see Transportation), a new civilization is created in the Near Future. [JC]
Kotzwinkle, William
(1938- ) US author who began his career in 1969 as an author of books for Young Adults and younger children [see Checklist below], most of which – like The Ants Who Took away Time (1978 chap), in which the solar system must be searched for the ant-dismembered Watch which keeps Time together, and Walter the Farting Dog (2001) – are visibly accomplished. His genre-crossing ...
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 ...