SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Radiohead
UK rock group from the Oxford area. Their early work is recognizable, if high quality, "indie" rock, haunted by and expressive of contemporary anomie and angst. But the band's third album OK Computer (1997) exaggerated this individual sense of despair into a coherent and powerful Dystopian vision. Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was ...
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 ...
Macdonald, Helen
(1970- ) UK naturalist and author, best known for H is for Hawk (2014), a memoir, a narrative of a year spent training a goshawk, and a study of T H White, whose The Goshawk (1951) is cited. They are of sf interest for Prophet (2023) with Sin Blaché, set in a Near Future world victimized by a ...
Long, Duncan
(1949-2016) US illustrator, author and editor of a Survivalist newsletter. His first novel, Anti-Grav Unlimited (1988; vt Antigrav Unlimited 3.1 2015), features a super-competent tinker/inventor hero (see Edisonade; Invention) who – in a Post-Holocaust atmosphere almost perfectly designed to serve as an arena for his exploits ...
Flash Fiction
A currently popular term for very short stories, formerly known as short-shorts or vignettes. Definitions vary; the acceptable length may approach 1000 words but is generally much less. Several publishers of Print Magazines liked short-shorts as a means of filling awkward spaces; they have grown more rather than less popular in the online twenty-first century, where Twitter users were long accustomed to compress significant meaning into 140-character tweets. ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...