SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 23 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
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
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, ...
Bacheller, Irving
(1859-1950) US journalist, media entrepreneur (founder of the Bacheller Syndicate, which marketed stories to newspapers) and author, most of his fiction being regional tales set in upper New York State. Of sf interest is his first novel, The Master of Silence: A Romance (1892), whose young protagonist, raised in isolation, becomes a Superman whose Superpowers include Telepathy, which ...
Ransome, Charles
(? -? ) UK author whose The Children of the Sun; Or, the Last of the Incas (1914), is an undemanding Lost Race tale for boys, set in the Andes. [JC]
Steffanson, Con
A House Name used by Avon Books for the initial four books of their sequence of Ties to the Flash Gordon franchise: Ron Goulart wrote the first three of these and Bruce Cassiday the fourth. Two further titles appeared as by Cassiday's own pseudonym Carson Bingham. [DRL]
Laidlaw, Ross
(1931- ) Scottish author, mostly of historical novels and thrillers; of sf interest is his first novel, The Lion Is Rampant (1979), a Dystopian political thriller set in the impoverished Near Future Scotland of the 1980s, when the Scottish Freedom Party attempts to wrest power from the morally and political bankrupt south. [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. 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 ...