SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 September 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 7 September 2026
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
McCaffrey, Gigi
Working name of Georgeanne Johnson (1959- ), US author, daughter of Anne McCaffrey and sister of Todd McCaffrey, who has contributed to her family's creation and prolongation of the complex Pern sequence with Dragon's Code: Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern (2018). The story deals with states of internal and external exile suffered by survivors and descendants of the last ...
Angelo
Pseudonym of the unidentified US author (? -? ) of The Dancing Imps of the Wine; Or, Stories and Fables (coll 1880), which contains some fantasies, and Adventures of an Atom: Its Autobiography, by Itself (1880), a Tale of Circulation made up of a series of interwoven anecdotes narrated by the eponymous entity, which it declares of itself (see ...
Toxic Avenger, The
Film (1984). HCH/Troma/Palan. Directed by Michael Herz, Samuel Weil. Written by Joe Ritter, based on a story by Lloyd Kaufman. Cast includes Mitchell Cohen, Andree Maranda and Mark Torgl. 100 minutes, cut to 79 minutes. Colour. / After a cruel practical joke is played on him, a teenage nerd falls into a barrel of toxic waste in Tromaville, New Jersey, "Toxic Waste Capital of America". He mutates (see Mutants) into the low-budget ...
Henningsen, Charles Frederick
(1815-1877) UK-born soldier and author of Swedish parentage, active in the former capacity in Spain, Russia, Hungary, Nicaragua and Grenada, rising to the rank of brigadier-general in the army of one of these countries, though it has not been determined which; he had emigrated to the United States by 1851, where he helped wage military campaigns intended to extend the practice of Slavery throughout Central America, and eventually fought on the Confederate side in ...
Edelman, Scott
(1955- ) US editor and author, his fiction having had perhaps unduly little recognition, almost certainly because his work shifts from horror to fantasy to sf without any marketing consistency; his first work of genre interest was "Guinea Pigs" in Fantasy Book for May 1983. The stories assembled in Suicide Art (coll 1992 chap) are horror, though some tales in These Worlds Are Haunted (coll 2001) are sf; various ...
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 ...