SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 March 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 9 March 2026
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Rose, F Horace
(1875-1965) South African editor, screenwriter for silent films and author, a periodic UK resident, whose The Night of the World (1944), centres on a Timeslip in a Lost World oasis peopled by figures from other ages, the whole being haunted by the course of World War Two. His Scientific Romance The Maniac's Dream: A Novel of the Atomic Bomb ...
Fowler, Christopher
(1953-2023) UK advertising copywriter, film marketer (through his firm The Creative Partnership) and author, mostly of Horror tales and thrillers, also using the pseudonym L K Fox. He began to publish work of genre interest with the stories assembled in his first work of fiction, City Jitters (coll 1986): several of these tales are focused on London, where much of his work was set, including his first novel, ...
Tallis, Frank
(1958- ) UK clinical psychologist and author, mostly of The Liebermann Papers series, a nonfantastic crime novel series set in pre-1914 Vienna; of sf interest are Killing Time (1999), whose protagonist, after episodes of psychosis while trapped in a Virtual Reality world, commits murders in the here and now; and Sensing Others (2000), whose protagonist suffers Drugs-induced ...
Runyon, Charles W
(1928-2015) US author of thrillers and some sf, who began publishing the latter with "First Man in a Satellite" in Super-Science Fiction for December 1958; sixteen further short sf/fantasy stories followed, chiefly for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first sf novel Pig World (1971) depicts a Near-Future USA governed by a right-wing tyranny challenged by a vicious would-be demagogue. ...
Anthologies
Before the late 1940s, sf short stories, novellas and novelettes (see Hugo for definitions) were largely restricted to Magazines. (Magazines are, of course, a form of anthology, but they are not so counted in this encyclopedia.) Since then, increasingly, many readers have been introduced to sf through stories collected in books. Books are less fragile, kept in print longer, available in libraries and (especially for young readers in ...
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 ...