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Saturday 17 October 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 12 October 2026
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Kavenna, Joanna
(1974- ) UK journalist and author some of whose novels make sophisticated use of the SF Megatext, like her second, The Birth of Love (2010), where an intense narrative analysis and presentation of the nature of childbirth is broken into four sequences, the first three of them nonfantastic. The fourth narrative is set in a Dystopian Near Future, a world devastated ...
Rienow, Leona
(1903-1983) US author whose short Dark Pool Prehistoric SF sequence for children comprises The Bewitched Caverns (1948) and The Dark Pool (1949). With her husband Robert Rienow (1909-1989), a political scientist, she later wrote The Year of the Last Eagle (1970), a sour Near-Future comedy about Ecology, set in 1989. The hero's job, dejectedly ...
Powell, Van
(1886-? ) US screenwriter and author of some sf interest for at least two of his series of adventures for boys: the Mystery Boys series of adventures for boys, all five volumes – including The Mystery Boys and the Inca Gold (1931), a Lost Race tale – being published simultaneously; and the Sky Scout Airplane Boys sequence beginning with The Mystery Crash ...
Slauerhoff, Jan
(1898-1936) Dutch poet and author, who spent much of his adult life as a ship's doctor in exotic climes, and whose two published novels treat China as a symbolic and fantastical creation. Het verboden rijk (November 1931-September 1932 Forum; 1932; trans Paul Vincent as The Forbidden Kingdom, 2012) haunts a contemporary Irish wanderer with the memories and experience of the Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes (1524-1580), retracing Camoes' journey in China with 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 ...