SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Kostić, Zvonimir
(1950- ) Serbian playwright and author whose sf novel, Donji Svetovi (1986; trans Ivan Novaković as The Underworlds 2008), fits an Underground totalitarian Dystopia into a frame that evokes Urban Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], as this isolated world is located directly underneath ...
Stoddard, James
(? - ) US author whose complex Science Fantasy High House sequence, comprising The High House (1998) and The False House (1999), centres on the eponymous house (and its imitation) which may be sentient, certainly accesses a number of Dimensions, and serves as the focus of a battle between the forces of Order and Chaos. The High House won a ...
Fripp, Robert
(1946- ) UK musician, best known for founding King Crimson. Fripp has released a great many solo albums and collaborations with various other artists, often avant-garde and experimental in style. With Brian Eno he recorded the instrumental No Pussyfooting (1973), an evocatively droning and repeating work. The titles of its two tracks "The Heavenly Musical Corporation" and "Swastika Girls" both ...
Diaman, N A
(1936-2020) US photographer – as Nikos Diaman – and author of gay sf novels, including Ed Dean Is Queer (1978) and The Fourth Wall (1980), both of which see Near Future America as a Dystopia for homosexuals, though the first ends hopefully; and Private Nation (1997), whose gay protagonists must exist in a world oppressively subject to privatization gone mad. [JC]
Garrett, Randall
(1927-1987) US author whose third marriage was to Vicki Ann Heydron; his first publication was a Probability Zero vignette (see Flash Fiction) for Astounding Science-Fiction in 1944, and he went on to become a prolific writer for that magazine in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was at one time part of the Ziff-Davis stable writing 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 ...