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
Fukuda Tsuneari
(1912-1994) Japanese critic and playwright, largely known in his home country as the translator of G K Chesterton, Ernest Hemingway and William Shakespeare. Along with Tetsuo Arakawa, he was the producer/director of the stage play Star (1975), written by Yasutaka Tsutsui and deemed of sufficient genre content to win the following year's ...
Williams, Francis
Working name of UK journalist and author Edward Francis Williams, Baron Francis-Williams (1903-1970); a working newspaperman from 1920; he was dismissed from his editorship of the London Daily Herald in 1940 for refusing to abate his long-held anti-Nazi fervour; from 1941 he served as controller of press and censorship. His sf novel, The Richardson Story (1951; vt It Happened Tomorrow 1952), deals with an ominous Near Future ...
Herscholt, Wolfe
An Australian pseudonym or more likely a House Name used mainly by G C Bleeck and Russell Hausfeld on some unremarkable Scientific Thrillers titles, two of them of novella length. These are Magnetic Peril (1949 chap) and X-Ray Menace (1949 chap), both involving Inventions; in the first a new metal is used to magnetically attract ocean liners (see ...
Dickinson, Peter
(1927-2015) Northern-Rhodesia born journalist and author, in UK from 1935, father of John Dickinson; married from 1992 until his death to Robin McKinley, with whom he collaborated on the Elementals fantasy sequence [listed below]; assistant editor of the humorous magazine Punch from 1952 to 1969. Dickinson was initially best known for his adult fiction, in particular detective stories, ...
Crank!
US Semiprozine, Fall 1993 to #8 (undated 1998), initially quarterly but with a two-year gap before the final issue #8 in Spring 1988, trade paperback format, edited and published by Bryan Cholfin from Cambridge, Massachusetts. / The uncompromising style of Cholfin's Broken Mirrors Press (which has published worthy though uncommercial projects by writers such as David R Bunch and R A Lafferty) ...
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 ...