SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 July 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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Landis, Marie
(1920-1999) US author who published solely in collaboration with Brian Herbert: some short fiction, but more notably two novels, Memorymakers (1991), which deals with a future Earth riven by cannibalism, and The World of Darkness: Vampire: Blood on the Sun (1997), a Tie to the Role Playing Game. [JC]
Kingsbury, Donald
(1929- ) US-born academic and author, in Canada from 1948, naturalized in 1955, a teacher of mathematics at McGill University from 1956 until his retirement in 1986. He began publishing sf with "The Ghost Town" in Astounding for June 1952; he produced relatively little for nearly 30 years, though his intermittent appearances in Astounding, with both fiction and nonfiction, were generally noticed. What could not have been ...
Radio
The history of radio sf is badly under-researched, but it is clear that, in some important respects, it anticipates that of Television sf. The major televisual forms – the series, the serial and the anthology – were all originally developed for radio. Many television sf programmes, from Superman and Buck Rogers to The ...
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. ...
Rosewater, Frank
(1856-1934) US reformer and author whose arguments about the Utopia – focused on a reiterated argument that all income should be spent in the year of its earning – shape his obscurely told fictions. Two are of some interest: '96: A Romance of Utopia (1894; vt Utopia: A Romance of Today 1894) [for subtitles for this and the next title cited, see Checklist], whose protagonists travel by balloon to a ...
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 ...