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Monday 14 July 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.
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Balint, Emery
(1892-1982) US painter and author of Hungarian origins; it is not known if he himself emigrated from Hungary, as his first novel, the phantasmagoric Alpha (trans Louis Rittenberg 1927), may have been translated from manuscript. His sf novel is Don't Inhale It! (1949), in which a nuclear test accidentally splits Earth in sparring planetoids; Satire is intended. [JC]
Colvin, James
House Name used primarily by Michael Moorcock for book reviews and stories in New Worlds, and for one independent collection of stories: The Deep Fix (coll 1966), which led to the band name Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix. The name was occasionally used by other contributors for book reviews. Eventually Moorcock reported ...
Korzybski, Alfred
(1879-1950) Polish-born aristocrat (a count) sent after World War One to the USA as an artillery expert. He remained, and wrote a quasi-philosophical text, Science and Sanity (1933), which became the basic handbook of the General Semantics movement, later to prove so influential on the writer A E van Vogt and some others: George Hay was a UK devotee. With the support of a Chicago ...
Hilzinger, J Geo
(1850-1911) UK-born author, in USA from around 1880 and naturalized 1893; his sf novel, The Skystone: A Romance of Prehistoric Arizona. Being Vol I of the Chronicles of Mázacl (1899), is an unusual combination of the Lost Race and the Prehistoric SF modes: the prehistoric civilization of Mázacl, which makes use of strange powers emanating (apparently) from a meteorite, turns out to be the hidden ...
Atherton, Gertrude
(1857-1948) US author, biographer and historian. In a long career that extended from 1882 to 1946 she published about 50 books in a multitude of genres, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Caves of Death" for San Francisco News Letter in 1886; her first novel was an occult romance involving metempsychosis, What Dreams May Come: A Romance (1888) as by Frank Lin (see Reincarnation). In ...
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 ...