SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 7 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 1 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Wall, A
(1828-1906) UK author, almost certainly the Victorian writer on photography, actor, playwright, journalist and painter Andrew Henry Wall, who also served as the Librarian of the Shakespeare Memorial Library in Stratford. He is the author of two novels of some sf interest: A Romance of N'Shabé: Being a Record of Startling Adventures in South Central Africa (1891) with Andrew A Anderson, set in Zimbabwe, where the last descendants of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba demonstrate ...
Vanewords, John Pre
(? -? ) UK author of The Great Miracle; Or The Man Who Could Not Be Killed [for full subtitle see Checklist] (1914) describes the career of a kind of Superman, whose invulnerability and ability to pass through walls comes from a Magic spell, and who becomes a moderately sympathetic Antihero in his defiance of civilization. [JC]
Stoddard, Jason
(? - ) US author who also writes as by Brett Patton, and who began to publish work of genre interest with "Unfinished" in Strange Horizons for 10 and 17 May 2004. His longer work has been restricted to series, though Winning Mars (2010), with sequels intended, remains technically a singleton; it extrapolates a traditional sf Media Landscape – the privatized ...
Frakes, Jonathan
(1952- ) US actor, best known for his role as Commander William T Riker in all 187 episodes of the second Star Trek television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994); he also directed several episodes of this and other Star Trek series as well as the films Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998). His sf ...
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 ...