SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 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: Ted Chiang
Olshaker, Mark
(1951- ) US FBI officer (retired 1995) and author of several Technothrillers; of sf interest is Einstein's Brain (1981), in which aspects of the brain of Alfred Einstein are implanted by neurosurgery into a scientist, a writer and a rabbi (see Identity Transfer), leading to a form of gestalt capable of continuing Einstein's work in the 1980s. [JC]
Vara, Vauhini
(1982- ) Canadian-born journalist, editor and author, in US from late childhood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "We'll Rise Above the Sky" in Glimmer Train for Summer 2013; her short fiction has been assembled as This Is Salvaged (coll 2025). She is of sf interest for her first novel, The Immortal King Rao (2022), set mostly in the Near Future of an ...
Comstock, Sarah
(? -1960) US author of regional tales mostly set in South Dakota whose last novel, The Moon Is Made of Green Cheese (1929), is of sf interest for its portrait of an astronomer (see Astronomy) responsible for some controversial findings and who engages in discussions with a mentor. His friends describe this mentor as an imaginary being; the astronomer's own description, if taken literally, would define his mentor as an ...
Edison, Thomas Alva
(1847-1931) US inventor, entrepreneur and author, credited with numerous Inventions – including the light bulb, the phonograph and significant contributions to the development of the motion picture – for which he received more than 1093 patents. It has been argued that Edison's working practice was to supervise the original work of others, taking corporate credit for them in his own name (a practice which, under various descriptions, remains common in ...
Time Distortion
The pioneering sf story of distorted time is H G Wells's "The New Accelerator" (December 1901 Strand), introducing a Drug that "speeds up" Time for its users and makes the world around them seem almost to freeze. As far as others are concerned, the users have attained temporary Invisibility while in motion. Drugs achieve the same effect in ...
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 ...