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Friday 14 August 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 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Black Cat, The
US short-story magazine founded in Boston by Herman D Umbstaetter (1851-1913) in October 1895. Umbstaetter remained its publisher, under the Short Story Publishing Co imprint, and editor until the September 1912 issue when his health forced him to sell the magazine to Samuel E Cassino (1856-1937) who ran it with his son, Herman, until 1919. Theresa E Dyer (1872-1967), who had been Umbstaetter's assistant, continued to edit the magazine, but when Cassino transferred the magazine to Salem, MA, ...
Wonderama
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed in middle-grade paper. Publisher: Pure Imagination. Editor: Forrest J Ackerman. One undated issue published 1993. / Yet another attempt by Ackerman to return to Media Magazine publishing after the conclusion of the original run of Famous Monsters of Filmland in the 1980s. Featured material ...
Garner, Alan
(1934- ) UK author whose early work was primarily for children; he has lived all his life near Alderley Edge, Cheshire, the setting for nearly all his fiction. Garner is widely thought one of the finest, though most difficult, children's writers of his generation; he ceased publishing for younger audiences after about 1980; after a long hiatus, he published two adult novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), each of them ...
Athey, Henry
(? -? ) US author of an sf novel, With Gyves of Gold: A Novel (1898) with A Herbert Bowers, both writers remaining untraced, though both may have been based in Missouri. A young man, experimented upon by a modestly Mad Scientist, develops the paranormal ability to travel by astral means to another planet, where he observes the operation of a Utopia ...
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 ...