SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 13 September 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 7 September 2026
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Chadwick, Paul
(1902-1972) US Pulp author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Crusaders of Space" in Amazing Stories Quarterly for Fall/Winter 1932. He is best known for his creation of the character Secret Agent "X" in the short lead novel "The Torture Trust" in Secret Agent "X" for February 1934 under the pseudonym Brant House, which became a ...
Severance, Carol
(1944-2015) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Isle of Illusion" for Tales of the Witch World (anth 1987) edited by Andre Norton, an anthology of stories set in Norton's Witch World Shared World. Severance's first novel, Reefsong (1991), which won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award, features a ...
Tower Comics
The Comics imprint of Tower Books, active from 1965 to 1969, originally edited by Wally Wood. Wood found himself unable to handle the workload alone and brought in veteran comics writer Samm Schwartz (1920-1997) to help with all titles except his own. Wood had been promised a great deal of creative control and a large budget for the line, which included teen titles, war comics, and Superhero titles. It ...
La Folie, Louis-Guillaume De
(1739-1780) French polymath, industrial chemist and author, member of l'Académie de Rouen, whose surname also appears as de la Follie. His Proto SF tale, Le Philosophe sans Prétention ou L'Homme Rare: Ouvrage Physique, Chymique, Politique et Moral, Dédié aux Savants ["The Unpretentious Philosopher or the Rare Man: A Physical, Chemical, Political and Moral Work, Dedicated to Scholars"] (1775) as M[onsieur] D L F, features ...
Moffitt, Donald
(1931-2014) US author who started publishing work of genre interest with "The Devil's Due" in Fantastic for May 1960. His first outright sf novel is The Jupiter Theft (1977), a tale which established him as an author of numerate, physics-oriented, fast-moving Hard-SF adventures (see Jupiter). After some years of silence came the Genesis series – The Genesis Quest (1986) ...
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 ...