SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 14 May 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.
Site updated on 11 May 2026
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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Hayter, Alethea
(1911-2006) Egyptian-born editor and author, in the UK from early adulthood, never affiliated to an academic institution, whose nonfiction work (not unusually for a non-institutional scholar) was significantly innovative; she is probably best known for the bio-critical study, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), which focuses attentively on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Her early novels as by J C Fennessy include Eden Island (1941), whose ...
Wilcox, Henry S
(1855-1924) US lawyer and author whose first novel was Flaws (1885; vt A Strange Flaw 1906) initially as By a Lawyer, in which a small fraud concatenates into a country-shaking scandal. He is of genre interest for his second novel, a Lost Race tale: The Great Boo-Boo: A Tale of Fun and Fancy, Replete with Love, Wit, Sentiment and Satire (1892), an early American example of pornographic sf, though ...
First Person Shooter
Term used to describe a form of Videogame distinguished by a three-dimensional character's eye view of the world and fast paced, often violent, gameplay which requires players to react rapidly and acquire physical skills. "First Person" refers to the camera position – as opposed to the third person view of the main character used in most graphical Adventures and ...
Bambaataa, Afrika
(1957- ). US musician and performer, sometimes credited with inventing "rap" as a musical style. Bambaataa's first single "Planet Rock" (1982) sampled "Trans-Europe Express" by Kraftwerk and added Bambaataa's vocals. Blending the designedly machinic, bloodless, north-European musical style with an impassioned African-American content, though perhaps a counter-intuitive step, was a brilliant move, and proved enormously influential on ...
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 ...