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Friday 13 February 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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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
SF Digest
UK small A4-size magazine. One undated issue, (June) 1976, published by New English Library; edited by Julie Davis. / SF Digest was to have been a quarterly successor to Science Fiction Monthly, also edited by Julie Davis since January 1975, but was doomed even before its single issue appeared by the publisher's decision to concentrate on books rather than sf magazines. SF Digest's format was arguably superior to that of the ...
Pudney, John
(1909-1977) UK editor, poet, journalist and author, initially best known as a poet, beginning with his first book, Spring Encounter (coll 1933 chap); his most famous single poem is "For Johnny" (1941 News Chronicle), a ballad-like ode on the deaths of airmen published after the Battle of Britain (see World War Two). Some of the tales assembled in It Breathed Down my Neck: A Selection of Stories (coll 1946) are supernatural. ...
Sullivan, Alan
(1868-1947) Canadian engineer, poet and author in the UK from around 1920 to 1940; prolific in various genres from 1891, including popular fiction as Sinclair Murray. Works of some interest include The Jade God (1924), In the Days of Their Youth (1926), a Posthumous Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], The Magic Makers (1930), in which Eskimos are overawed by ...
Shared Worlds
Stories and novels written by different hands but sharing a setting are in this encyclopedia called shared-world stories. They are usually (but not always) published as contributions to original-Anthology series, in turn usually (but not always) edited by the creator(s) of the original setting, who also controls the "bible". This "bible" is a set of rules controlling a shared world by defining the roles, actors, venues, genres, plots and significance of any story ...
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 ...