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Saturday 14 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Sargent, Lyman Tower
(1940- ) US academic, bibliographer and author, in the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St Louis, Professor Emeritus since 2005; he founded and edited until 2004 the journal Utopian Studies. Since his own first essay of interest, "Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary Science Fiction" for The Futurist in 1972, his sf work has been exclusively focused on the study of Utopias and ...
Women SF Writers
In the opinion of many it was a woman, Mary Shelley, who created sf with Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831). But after such a strong start women's contributions to the genre, while never entirely absent, were not substantial – certainly not in American Genre SF – until the late 1960s. Nevertheless it should be noted that women contributed to the ...
Jennison, John W
(1911-1980) UK author, one of several who became active as mass-producers of genre fiction for UK paperback houses and who remained reticent about personal details during their careers. From about 1945 to the year in which it is thought he may have died, Jennison seems to have written over 100 novels under at least forty pseudonyms, mostly thrillers and Westerns; he began to publish routine but occasionally engaging sf with two novels as Edgar Rees Kennedy, ...
Evil Brain from Outer Space
Japanese/US film (1966). Shintoho. Directed by Chogi Akasaka and Teruo Ishii. Written by Ichiro Miyagawa and Teruo Ishii. Cast includes Hiroshi Asami, Akira Nakamura, Tomohiko Ôtani and Ken Utsui. 78 minutes. Black and white. / This was compiled from episodes 7, 8 and 9 of the Japanese Super Giant film series (see Tokusatsu), edited and dubbed by Walter Manley Enterprises into Evil Brain From Outer Space for ...
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 ...