SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
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Haggard, J Harvey
(1912-2001) US author and railwayman, known primarily for his stories in the early sf Pulp magazines, chiefly Wonder Stories. His first story, "Faster Than Light" (October 1930 Wonder Stories) was written when he was seventeen in response to a contest in Air Wonder Stories and takes on the bold idea of accelerating to the speed of light and breaking through ...
Dudley, Roy C
(1922-2011) US printing technician and author of Galactic Gambit (1971), an unremarkable Space Opera. [JC]
Captain Marvel
US Comic-book character, in fact a sequence of characters, the first of which to bear the name was created by artist C C Beck (the first to draw the character) and writer Bill Parker. Captain Marvel first appeared in 1940 in Fawcett's Whiz Comics (1940-1953) and then contemporaneously in Fawcett's Captain Marvel Adventures (1941-1953); Jack Kirby and Mac Raboy were among its many later illustrators. Foremost among ...
Green, Henry
Pseudonym of UK industrialist and author Henry Vincent Yorke (1905-1973), whose several laconic but richly thought-through nonfantastic novels, from Blindness (1926) to Doting (1952), gained him a small but intensely appreciative readership. A short fantasy tale, "Monsta Monstrous", was drafted in the early 1920s, though it only reached print posthumously in Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green (coll 1992). His one sf novel, ...
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. ...
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 ...