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Friday 27 March 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 23 March 2026
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Deighton, Len
Working name of UK illustrator and author Leonard Cyril Deighton (1929-2026), mostly not resident in Britain after 1969; author of spy novels, cookery books and some other nonfiction, but still perhaps best known for early espionage thrillers like The Ipcress File (1962), the first of the Secret File sequence which features the same undisciplined and unnamed secret agent, and the subsequent Funeral in Berlin (1964). The fourth volume of the series, ...
Pendleton, John
(1848-?1926) UK journalist, railway historian and author of a Lost Race novel, The Ivory Queen: A Story of Strange Adventure (1897), set in Africa, where survivors of the fall of the Palmyrene Empire of Queen Zenobia (240-circa 274) have fled, and whose descendants have established an agrarian Utopia. [JC]
Her
Film (2013). Annapurna Pictures. Written and directed by Spike Jonze. Cast includes Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson, Matt Letscher, Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Chris Pratt and Olivia Wilde. 126 minutes. Colour. / In Near Future Los Angeles (see California), a clement metropolis seemingly full of thirtysomethings absorbed by personal relationships, Theodore (Phoenix) works for BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, where he ...
Erickson, Steve
Working name of US author Stephen Michael Erickson (1950- ), active as a journalist for some years before his first novel, Days Between Stations (1985), quickly established his reputation as an author of dark, journey-haunted, surreal Fabulations about the USA and the twentieth century. Labyrinthine figurations of apocalypse dominate his grey and hyperbolic landscapes; but a powerful sense of geography, notable also in the ...
Reverie, Reginald
Pseudonym of US author Grenville Mellen (1799-1841), whose extremely early volume of short stories, Sad Tales and Glad Tales (coll 1828), has been claimed as a shaping influence upon Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Of sf interest in the collection is a Satire, "The Meeting of the Planets", in which the planets talk among themselves about Homo sapiens; and "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 ...
