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Sunday 12 July 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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Volney, M
(1757-1820) French philosopher, traveller and author; he adopted the name Volney, a contraction of Voltaire and Ferney (a French commune), which became his title. After initial travels to the Middle East, and the publication of books describing his responses, he deepened his contemplation of the world in Les Ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires (1791; trans anon as ...
Unearth
US magazine in Digest format, eight issues, Winter 1977 to Winter 1979, published from Boston by Unearth Publications, edited by Jonathan Ostrowsky-Lantz and John M Landsberg. Subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction Discoveries", the cleverly titled Unearth had the avowed intention that all fiction should be by previously unpublished authors or by authors previously published only in Unearth, or be reprints of first-sf-story sales by well known ...
Molesworth, Vol
(1924-1964) Australian journalist and author, active in Fandom around the period of World War Two. His sf included two series: the Ape of God sequence, comprising Ape of God (1943 chap) and Monster at Large (1943 chap), which retells Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) in an Australian setting (see also ...
Smith, Ray
(1941-2019) Canadian teacher and author who is of sf interest for the title story (Autumn 1967 Tamarack Review) of Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada (coll 1969), in which a successful Near-Future American Invasion of Canada is occasioned by the election of an insufficiently right-wing national government. His later work, set in various Canadian and European ...
Younghusband, Francis
(1863-1942) UK soldier, explorer, journalist and author, now notorious (though praised at the time) for his almost certainly unauthorized invasion of Tibet in 1903-1904 (see Imperialism), in which it is estimated (perhaps exaggeratedly) that up to a thousand Tibetan monks were killed for each British soldier who died; too old for active combat in World War One, he helped form a ginger group advocating its ruthless continuation. ...
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 ...