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 18 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Gerard, Louise
(1878-1970) UK author, almost exclusively of romances, some of them literally bodice-rippers, featuring heroines who are frequently abducted, bound, raped, and who then fall in love with the aristocratic perp; her first novel, The Golden Centipede (1910), features, on the other hand, a dominatrix white queen, a She figure who rules a Lost Race in the heart of darkest Africa. [JC]
Caveney, Philip
(1951- ) UK advertising copywriter and author, primarily of horror and Young Adult fantasy, beginning with his first novel, The Sins of Rachel Ellis (1978), a Timeslip tale. Two of his series are fantasy: the Sebastian Darke sequence beginning with Sebastian Darke: Prince of Fools (2007), whose protagonist is a half-elf jester; and the Alec Devlin sequence beginning with ...
Wingert, Jennifer
(? - ) US author whose first novel, Spirit Fox (1998) with Mickey Zucker Reichert, is a fantasy whose female Hero uses Magic and martial arts, as well as the indwelling spirit of a ghost fox, to defeat an Invasion. Her second novel, Grasp the Stars (2004), is a wide-ranging ...
Stoddard, William O
(1835-1925) US editor, government official, inventor and author, Abraham Lincoln's Assistant Private Secretary 1861-1864, resigning for health reasons which also truncated his slightly later career as a United States Marshall in Arkansas. His patents were in the field of publishing. He began to publish fiction in 1869, producing in the end more than 100 volumes, mostly for young readers. Those of sf interest include two Lost Race novels: ...
Foster, Monalisa
(? - ) Romanian-born US author with a degree in physics, who has also worked in engineering and medicine; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Dolus Magnus: The Great Hoax" and "Equality", both in MAGA 2020 & Beyond (anth 2017) edited by Marina Fontaine, Jason Rennie and Dawn Witzke. Her first book-length fiction was Ravages of Honor (2019), opening the Ravages of Honor trilogy of swashbuckling dynastic ...
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 ...