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Thursday 22 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.
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Kasdan, Lawrence
(1949- ) US filmmaker, producer and screenwriter who wrote the screenplay for Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) with Leigh Brackett and George Lucas. Other screenplay credits include Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi ...
Space Wars Heroes
US letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on newsprint. Published by Myron Fass as Stories, Layouts and Press. Editor: probably Jeffrey Goodman. Three bimonthly issues, 1979. / This Fass publication focused somewhat more heavily on Television than its stablemates, covering such programmes as Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979) and The ...
Sword and Sorcery
This term – describing a subgenre of Fantasy embracing adventures with swordplay and Magic – seems to have first appeared in a genre-fiction context in 1953 as part of the headline "Sword and Sorcery in the Bronze Age" for a review (13 December 1953 Daily Oklahoman) by Dwight V Swain of L Sprague de Camp's The Tritonian Ring (coll ...
Anet, Claude
Pseudonym of Swiss athlete (he was the premier French tennis player in 1892) and author Jean Schopfer (1868-1931). His sf novel La fin d'un monde (1925; trans Jeffery E Jeffery as The End of a World 1927), which is Prehistoric SF, describes the cultural destruction of an Ice Age people by a more advanced culture. [JC] see also: Origin of Man. /
Smith, William Hawley
(1845-1922) US educator and author whose first novel, The Evolution of "Dodd," in His Struggle for the Survival of the Fittest in Himself: Tracing his Chances, his Changes, and How He Came Out (1884) [see Checklist for vt and other data], examines Social Darwinism cursorily. Of sf interest is very Near Future The Promoters: A Novel without a Woman (1904), whose shady protagonists hope to apply to ...
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 ...