SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 8 December 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 8 December 2025
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Rouff, Marcel
(1877-1936) Swiss-born French author of a Future History, Voyage au monde à l'envers (1 October-15 November 1920 Mercure de France; 1923; trans Brian Stableford as Journey to the Inverted World 2011), whose aviator narrator, having disappeared from a Europe convulsed by World War One, finds himself in Australia two millennia hence, which he ...
Moore, Phyllis S
(? - ) Canadian author, whose sf tale, Williwaw! (1978), about Near Future separatist revolt in Newfoundland, is surprisingly violent. [JC]
Varan the Unbelievable
Film (1958; 1962 US). Original Japanese title Daikaijū Baran. Dallas Productions Inc/Toho Company (uncredited)/Crown International Pictures. Produced by Jerry A Baerwitz. Directed by Baerwitz and Ishirō Honda (uncredited). Written by Sid Harris from a story by Ken Kuronuma and Shi'ichi Sekizama (uncredited). Cast includes Myron Healey, Clifford Kawada and Tsuruko Kobayashi. 70 minutes. Black and white. / US naval commander James Bradley (Healey) is in charge ...
Uplift
This term, both noun and verb, has entered the sf vocabulary, partly it may be to dodge the implications of, or simply to overleap, the kind of applied Eugenics that marks, for instance, the Arisians' breeding of an Aryan super race to rule the galaxies in E E Smith's Lensman series. Perhaps less toxically, a Secret Master race of advanced humans enacts ...
Leonard, Lawrence
(1923-2001) UK cellist, conductor, composer and author whose Young Adult tale, The Horn of Mortal Danger (1980), is set primarily Underground beneath London, where an ancient race, distinguishable from surface humans mostly by their small stature (see Great and Small), has flourished for many centuries by carefully imitating life on the surface. From ...
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 ...