SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 26 February 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 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Jack Gaughan Award
In full, the Jack Gaughan Award for Best Emerging Artist. Named in honour of artist Jack Gaughan and often referred to simply as the Gaughan Award, this is presented annually by NESFA, the New England Science Fiction Association, to an artist who has achieved professional status within the past five years. The winner is selected by a panel of judges. In practice, the qualification "within the past five years" seems to be applied fairly elastically; Richard ...
Patterson, James
(1947- ) US author who has become a chart-dominating best-seller over the past three decades, his greatest success being the Alex Cross sequence of crime thrillers featuring a Black forensic psychologist, where the occasional apparent incursion into the fantastic – such as the vampire cult in Violets Are Blue (2001), and the infernal "Mastermind" whose powers fall short of the supernatural – is found to be an evil but nonfantastic device. ...
Taylor, Geoff [2]
(1920-1992) UK-born Australian author of Day of the Republic (1968), set in a Near Future Australia about to lose free speech and other democratic values (see Politics) after the nation votes to leave the British Commonwealth and to become a republic, which is to say a fascist dictatorship. [JC]
Sinclair, Quinn
(? - ) US author whose Young Adult tale, The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow (1984), features a young lad whose powers of Precognition are expressed visually; his dysfunctional family threatens to darken his own future. [JC]
Corbett, Julian
(1854-1922) UK author (in his early career) who later became a naval historian (partly for reasons of social prestige). He is the author of a Lost Race tale, Kophetua the Thirteenth (1889 2vols), which describes the ancient Christian kingdom of Oneiria, a Utopia founded in Africa by an Englishman; notably, this utopia, based on a reform of Money, contains within it a ...
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 ...