SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 20 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Faster Than Light
According to Special Relativity the velocity of light is limiting: no matter how objects alter their velocity relative to one another, the sum of their velocities can never exceed the ultimate constant c (the velocity of light in a vacuum); moreover, the measurement of c is unaffected by the velocity of the measurer. The apparently paradoxical implications of this statement are avoided because objects travelling at high velocities relative to one ...
Murder in a Blue World
Spanish film (1973; original title Una gota de sangre para morir amando ["A Drop of Blood to Die Loving"]; vt To Love, Perhaps to Die, 1975; Clockwork Terror, 1986). José Frade Producciones / Cinematográficas S.A. / Intercontinental Productions. Directed by Eloy de la Iglesia. Written by Eloy de la Iglesia, José Luis Garci, Antonio Fons, Antonio Artero and George Lebourg. Cast includes Sue Lyon, ...
Krasnostein, Alisa
(? - ) Australian environmental scientist (now retired), critic, editor, reviewer and podcaster who won a Ditmar Award in 2007 as Best New Talent. In 2004 she set up the review website Aussie Specfic in Focus! which she ran until 2012, and ran both an early shared world webzine called New Ceres (2 issues 2006-2007) and a Young Adult fiction webzine ...
White Princess of the Jungle
US Comic (1951-1952). 5 issues. Avon Periodicals Inc.. Artists include Gene Fawcette, Everett Kinstler and Fred Schwab. 36 pages. Four long strips (three featuring Taanda) plus one or two pages of humorous strips or text stories. / In Central Africa there is "a wild, mysterious sun-bronzed beauty with flaming hair ... her unsheathed blade, ever poised to strike against deceit and treachery ... she is Taanda, white princess of the Tauruti tribe": she was raised from a baby by its chief ...
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 ...