SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 June 2025
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 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Gallagher, Diana G
(1946-2021) US illustrator and author, in the former capacity winning a Hugo award for best fan artist in 1989 (see Fandom) as Diana Gallagher Wu (she was then married to William F Wu). As an author she concentrated almost exclusively on Young Adult Ties to Television series such as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch ...
Bradley, Kaliane
(? - ) UK author in whose first novel, The Ministry of Time (2024), the extraction of living historical figures via Time Travel has become possible. Commander Graham Gore (1809-1847), of the doomed Franklin Expedition to the Arctic, has been reawoken in a Near Future London beset by Climate Change and other markers ...
Francis, Marianne
(? - ) UK author of Egyptian Light (1950), a dynastic-fantasy-like tale set in Atlantis, featuring a princess in flight and her espousal to the Egyptian pharaoh (see Ancient Egypt in SF) who rescues her after shipwreck. Atlantis sinks. [JC]
Campanella, Tommaso
(1568-1639) Italian philosopher, admitted into the Dominican order at the age of 14. Like Francis Bacon he attacked the reliance of contemporary science on the authority of Aristotle, advocating observation and experiment as the proper routes to knowledge in Philosophia Sensibus Demonstrata ["Philosophy as Demonstrated by the Senses"] (1591; in Latin); at about the same time he first met Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and he supported him against ...
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 ...