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Thursday 12 March 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 9 March 2026
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Kemp, Randall H
(1852-1914) US field mineralogist from 1890 or earlier on expeditions in Pacific Rim states of America, and author of A Half-Breed Dance and Other Far Western Stories: Mining Camp, Indian and Hudson's Bay Tales Based on the Experiences of the Author (coll 1909), which contains two tales of interest: "Underneath Spokane" features a virtual Hollow Earth of underground caverns; and in the Lost World described in "The ...
Psychohistory
A much-loved item of sf Terminology, coined in Isaac Asimov's very popular sequence Foundation (May 1942-January 1950 Astounding; fixups 1951-1953); it should not be confused with the identical term sometimes used by historians, which refers to the study of the relation of psychological motives to historical process. The attractive but purely ...
Scribe Award
The Scribe Awards for media Ties have been presented since 2007 by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers [see under links below]. There are various award categories, genre-specific and otherwise, which changed frequently in the early years but currently include novels, short fiction and audiobooks. The Scribe Grandmaster award – also known as the Faust Award in honour of Frederick Faust (see Max ...
Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm
(1969- ) US academic historian, anthropologist and critic, currently teaching at Pace University in Manhattan, who has published extensively on popular culture including Games and sf in Cinema and Television. His reviews of genre-related work began to appear in Extrapolation with the Spring 2000 issue. His first three edited anthologies of ...
Jakubowski, Maxim
(1944- ) UK critic, publisher, bookseller, translator, anthologist and author. He was educated in France and writes in both French and English. After some time as a company director in the flavour industry, he turned to publishing, becoming Managing Director of Virgin Books (1980-1983) and then taking up directorships of Zomba and Rainbird. Between 1988 and his retirement in 2009 he ran the Murder One bookshop, in central London, which specialized in mysteries; between ...
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 ...