SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Adam, Paul
(1862-1920) French journalist, editor and author, mostly of historical novels through which he espoused strongly argued anarchist views. Of sf interest is Lettres de Malaisie ["Letters from Malaysia"] (November 1896-August 1897 La Revue Blanche; 1898; vt La Cité Prochaine ["The Next City"]: Lettres de Malaisie 1908) which described a totalitarian Dystopia occupying much of the interior of Borneo from 1850 onwards. ...
Strange Plasma
US Semiprozine, letter-size, published by Edgewood Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and edited by Steve Pasechnick. Intended to be quarterly the magazine ran for eight occasional issues, once or twice a year between Summer 1989 and Winter 1994, Pasechnick openly admitting that producing a Small Press magazine was "far more difficult" than he had imagined. Subtitled "speculative + imaginative fiction", ...
Night of the Carrots, The
Estonian animated film (1998; original title Porgandite öö). Eesti Joonisfilm. Directed and written by Priit Pärn. Narration by Frank Boyle. 29 minutes. Colour. / Diego, lover of the round, hater of the angular, arrives at PGI hoping to book a room. A sprawling, architecturally unappealing structure, PGI is a hotel (perhaps also a sanatorium) and, as the queues outside attest, much in demand: getting a ...
Borgo Press
Former US publishing house, a Small Press which long maintained a fairly extensive list of works of interest to sf. Its name is a play on "Borgo Pass," the name for Romania's Tihuţa Pass used in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897; rev with cuts 1901). Originally based in California, the company was founded in 1975 by Robert Reginald, as publisher and ...
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 ...