SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 18 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Earthworm Jim
US animated tv series (1995-1996). AKOM, Flextech Television Limited, Universal Animation Studios. Created by Doug TenNapel, based on the 1994 platform game (see Videogames) of the same name. Directors include Pam Garry, Graham Morris, Sue Peters and Bill Reed. Most episodes written by Doug Langdale. Voice cast includes Charlie Adler, Jeff Bennett, Dan Castellaneta, Jim Cummings, Edward Hibbert, Andrea Martin and Kath Soucie. Twenty-three 21 minute episodes. ...
Paris, John
Pseudonym of UK diplomat and author Frank Trelawny Arthur Ashton-Gwatkin (1889-1976), who specialized in Japanese affairs through much of his earlier professional career, though the publication of his first novel, Kimono (1921), with its negative assessment of Japanese culture, curtailed his influence in the Far East, though his career advanced in the UK, where he retired as minister of HM diplomatic missions in 1947. The Island Beyond Japan (1929) is a ...
Taylor, Joelle
(1967- ) UK poet, playwright and author, active from the early 1990s, several of her early plays, like Naming (performed 1994 Oval House Theatre, London), gaining some reputation, without necessarily reaching publication, for their frontal confrontations with a range of connected issues (see Feminism, Sex). She began publishing poetry with Ska Tissue (coll 2011 chap); her fourth collection, ...
Moscoe, Mike
(1947- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Summer Hopes – Winter Dreams" in Analog for March 1991, but who has since concentrated mainly on series, sometimes as by Mike Shepherd, beginning with the Lost Millennium sequence comprising First Dawn (1996) Second Fire (1997) and Lost Days (1998), whose protagonists arrive via Time Travel ...
Ecology
Ecology is the study of organisms in relation to their environment. It is a relatively new discipline, the first notable work on the subject being Animal Ecology (1927) by Charles Elton (1900-1991), a text which did much to establish ecology as an independent field of study. The complexity of the environmental relationships which determine the success, or even the survival, of populations has been realized only within the last half-century. The same period has seen a dramatic ...
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 ...