SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Mercier, Lewis Page
(1820-1875) UK minister, schoolmaster and translator, signing as Mercier Lewis and Louis Mercier; it has been surmised that a combination of career and financial difficulties forced him into the translation trade, and these pressures plus ill health may explain the occasional shoddiness of (and frequent cuts to) his translations of Jules Verne novels; the frequency with which they were reprinted remains anomalous. The degree to which his translations were ...
Ashley, Mike
Working name of UK editor and researcher Michael Raymond Donald Ashley (1948- ), who has a special expertise in the history of magazine sf, fantasy and weird fiction; for this large body of significant work, he was given the Pilgrim Award for 2002. Ashley's first major work as an anthology editor was the four-volume The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, whose components are ...
DiMarco, Jennifer
(1973- ) US publisher and author, usually on Gender issues, who is best known for the Patriarchy sequence, beginning with Escape to the Wind (1993), set in a Post-Holocaust Seattle run by an anti-female junta. Other work includes at least two novels, Immortality (1999) and Dragon Storm (2000). Her publishing firm, Pride & Imprints, claims to release books ...
Brown, Rosel George
(1926-1967) US author with an advanced degree in ancient Greek; for three years she worked as a welfare visitor in her native Louisiana. She began publishing stories in September 1958 with "From an Unseen Censor" for Galaxy; some of her tales were interplanetary, some more typical of "women's" fiction. A Handful of Time (coll 1963) assembles much of her early work. The Sibyl Sue Blue series – Sibyl Sue Blue (1966; vt ...
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 ...