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Saturday 14 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: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Scoville, Samuel, Jr
(1872-1950) US attorney, ornithologist and author, his nonfiction mostly popular books on natural history for younger readers; of his novels, the Boy Scouts sequence (after the first, which is nonfantastic) are of some sf interest: in The Blue Pearl (November 1919-October 1920 St Nicholas Magazine as "The Boy Scouts in the North; Or, the Blue Pearl"; 1920) the boys find in the far North a Lost Race which allows them – after ...
Vetch, Thomas
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Amber City: Being Some Account of the Adventures of a Steam Crocodile in Central Africa (1888), a Jules-Verne-like excursion narrated by the protagonist, Thomas Vetch, who takes his flying ship into a mild-mannered African Lost World where people live in houses built of amber. [JC]
Comets
Small, normally icy bodies of our solar system whose appearance during close approach to the Sun can be spectacular owing to heating and outgassing effects producing the coma (a visible local atmosphere surrounding the central nucleus) and long tail of dust and gas blown outward from the sun by the Solar Wind. Owing to this visibility and the regular return of short-period comets – whose home is in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit ...
Schroeder, Andreas
(1946- ) German-born poet, broadcaster and author, in Canada from 1951; much of his work skirts various regions of Fantastika, including the fabulistic tales and parables assembled in The Late Man (coll 1972), his first volume of fiction, some of which are sf, and the more organized of which convey some of the surreal fixity of gaze of Franz Kafka. The protagonist of Dustship Glory ...
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 ...