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Sunday 7 June 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.
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin
(1857-1935) Russian scientist and author. He began investigating the possibility of Space Flight in 1878. In his monograph Free Space (1883 chap) he suggested that Spaceships would have to operate by jet propulsion. His consideration of some of the practical difficulties led to a paper entitled "How to Protect Fragile and Delicate Objects from Jolts and Shocks" (1891). In 1903 he ...
Magroon, Vector
Pseudonym thought to belong to the UK author and editor Julian Franklyn (1899-1970), who also wrote on the occult and parapsychology, and is said to have written both sf and crime for the publishers Scion while an editor there. A single sf novel appeared under the Magroon byline, the Space Flight adventure Burning Void (1952). The frequent identification of this pseudonym as John Russell Fearn's is definitely ...
Gombrowicz, Witold
(1904-1969) Polish playwright, essayist and author whose work was not directly connected with Genre SF, though he occasionally utilized fantastic elements; his impact on Polish literature (see Poland) was unprecedented both at the level of his highly original narrative technique, for which he derived idiosyncratic diminutive forms and neologisms, and a consistent philosophy, at some points evoking associations with existentialism, ...
Barren, Charles
(1913-1999) UK teacher and author, best known for historical romances; co-author with R Cox Abel of Trivana I (1966), in which an overpopulated Earth uses the titular Spaceship (powered by an Ion Drive) to establish a Venus colony (see Colonization of Other Worlds). Barren also scripted a sf drama, "The Planet of ...
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 ...