SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 24 April 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 21 April 2025
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Super 8
Film (2011). Amblin Entertainment/Bad Robot Productions for Paramount Pictures. Produced by J J Abrams and Steven Spielberg. Directed by Abrams. Written by Abrams. Cast includes Gabriel Basso, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Ron Eldard, Noah Emmerich, Elle Fanning, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills and Glynn Turman. 112 minutes. Colour. / Summer, 1979. Teenage high-school friends are making an amateur ...
Gallion, Jane
(1938-2003) US poet and author, best known for gonzo pornography, the only sf example of which is Biker (1969), a Post-Holocaust tale set in a California dominated by bikers and Drug-cults, and other manifestations of hippy culture gone haywire, in which the repeated acts of rape inflicted on the protagonist are conveyed realistically, and conspicuously without auctorial relish. "Beneath ...
Schafer, Steve
(? - ) US author whose first novel, The Border (2017), is a non-fantastic Young-Adult thriller set along the Mexican-American border; he is of sf interest for his second novel, eMortal (2024), whose brilliant young-adult protagonist upcodes an AI-powered Android into something like Superman. He is also ...
Davy, Humphry
(1778-1829) English scientist and author famous for inventing the miner's safety-lamp in 1815; knighted 1812, baronet 1818, President of the Royal Society 1820. In his youth he was an acquaintance of the romantic poets of the day: a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped correct the proofs of Coleridge's and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (coll 1798), and some of his own poems were included in an anthology edited by Robert Southey. His last work, ...
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 ...