SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Omni Online
US website originally an extension of Omni magazine but which continued in its own right once Omni ceased its print publication with the Winter 1995 issue. Omni had first set up an internet presence via Compuserve in September 1986 allowing subscribers access to a condensed version of the print magazine, an interactive "discussion" feature and the Omni Data Library. This facility was dubbed "Omni On-line" even at that stage. The experiment was ...
Winterson, Jeanette
(1959- ) UK author, much of whose work juggles elements out of the Fantastika toolkit to dramatize deeply held arguments about Gender (see also Feminism); as her work edges constantly into the allegorical it is, however, not easy to think of her as a natural author of the fantastic, though her work is too various and transgressive for her to be categorized as a ...
Blum, Yoav
(1978- ) Israeli software developer and author whose first translated novel, Metsarfe ha-miòkrim (2011; trans Ira Moskowitz as The Coincidence Makers 2018), in which (in a traditional sf sense) a group of young men and women exercise their professional skill, which resembles Psi Powers: the ability to create coincidences and events binding on the future, under the control of a ...
Gilchrist, Rosetta Luce
(1850-1921) US medical doctor and author of Tibby: A Novel Dealing with Psychic Forces and Telepathy (1904), in which Telepathy is used for Communication with a land beyond which seems to resemble a Utopia. [JC]
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 ...