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
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Hawke, Simon
(1951- ) US author who first published under his birth name, Nicholas (Valentin) Yermakov, but has written as Hawke (now his legal name) since 1984. His career began with some sf adventure novels and the Boomerang series, all composed in a baroque idiom, but he soon settled into more settled pursuits, writing several unpretentious sf and fantasy series as Hawke and Military SF as by J D Masters. As Yermakov his most interesting work ...
Kling, Marc-Uwe
(1982- ) German singer-songwriter, cabaret performer and author, active from around 2003; he is of interest for his first novel, QualityLand (2017; trans Jamie Lee Searle 2020), a vaudeville-like Satire of the Near Future Media Landscape, focused upon a Dystopian region called QualityLand where ...
Nowlan, Philip Francis
(1888-1940) US author whose first sf story, "Armageddon – 2419 A.D." (August 1928 Amazing) – published in the same issue of Amazing Stories that featured the inception of E E "Doc" Smith's Skylark saga – introduced Anthony "Buck" Rogers to the world, helping to inaugurate the reign of full-grown interstellar Space Opera in American sf. This and a ...
Time
"Time," a character explains in Ray Cummings's The Girl in the Golden Atom (stories 5 March 1919, 24 January-24 February 1920 All-Story Weekly; fixup 1921), "is what keeps everything from happening at once." This enormously broad sf theme is dealt with under several encyclopedia headwords, of which the most important is Time Travel. Physical travel through time is ...
Fifth Element, The
Film (1997). Gaumont. Directed by Luc Besson. Costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Cast includes Maïwenn Besco, Ian Holm, Mila Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Chris Tucker and Bruce Willis. 126 minutes. Colour. / 1914. An archaeologist discovers strange hieroglyphs in a hidden Egyptian tomb. Deciphered, they indicate that the Underground chamber has for almost 5000 years concealed a great ...
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 ...