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Sunday 10 May 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 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
McKay, Laura Jean
(1978- ) Australian author whose very Near Future novel, The Animals in That Country (2020), which won the Arthur C Clarke Award, describes a planetary Pandemic whose most radical effect is an opening of the gates of Perception – and, it may be, actual language (see Communication; ...
Pseudoscience
Pseudosciences are here defined as belief systems which, though adopting a scientific or quasiscientific terminology, are generally regarded as erroneous or unproven by the orthodox scientific community; frequently they not merely disagree with, or are improbable adjuncts to, accepted science but violate its fundamental tenets; several relevant figures and ideas have elsewhere been sorted under the "techno-occultism" rubric, in terms consistent with their presentation in this entry. They are ...
Captain Nemo and the Underwater City
Film (1969). Omnia/MGM. Directed by James Hill. Written by Jane Baker, Pip Baker and R Wright Campbell, based on the character created by Jules Verne. Cast includes Chuck Connors, Nanette Newman, Luciana Paluzzi and Robert Ryan. 106 minutes. Colour. / Towards the end of the nineteenth century a ship sinks in a violent storm. A few survivors find themselves on board a mysterious underwater ...
Boswell, Diane
(1899-1995) UK pilot and author, with the Air Transport Auxiliary in World War Two. As with many female authors of the twentieth century, her surname, which she took on her first marriage in 1922, was not a pseudonym during her literary career, though she had legally become Diane Farnell (her second husband's surname) by the time of her war service. In her first novel, Posterity: A Novel (1926), mandatory devices to decrease the birth rate in ...
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 ...