SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Hetzel, Jules
(1814-1886) French publisher and editor, best known outside of France for his significant (at times almost co-creative) relationship with Jules Verne, most of whose work first appeared in his magazine, the Magasin d'éducation et de récréation ["Magazine of Education and Entertainment"], and subsequently in book form in the Voyages Extraordinaires ["Extraordinary Voyages"] sequence, from ...
Big Man Japan
Japanese film (2007). Original title Dai Nipponjin. Directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto. Written by Hitoshi Matsumoto and Mitsuyoshi Takasu. Cast includes Shion Machida, Hitoshi Matsumoto, Daisuke Miyagawa and Taichi Yazaki. 114 minutes. Colour. / A documentary crew are following Masaru Daisatou (Matsumoto), an unprepossessing middle-aged man with a fondness for folding umbrellas: "they only get big when you need them to" (a similar remark is made ...
Jane, Fred T
(1865-1916) UK editor, illustrator and author, best known for founding the Jane's Fighting Ships series (as Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships from 1898; as Jane's Fighting Ships from 1905). Blake of the "Rattlesnake", or The Man Who Saved England: A Story of Torpedo Warfare in 189– (1895) is a Future War story in which, through a series of engagements, modern torpedoes save the UK from the Russians and ...
van Herck, Paul
(1938-1989) Belgian (Flemish) author whose Sam, of de Pluterdag (1968; trans Danny De Laet and Willy Magiels as Where Were You Last Pluterday? 1973) is a Satire of a society in which the higher classes have access to an extra day of the week. Van Herck also wrote a collection of ingenious short stories, De Cirkels en andere fantastische verhalen ["The Circles and other fantastic stories"] (coll 1965). [JC] see also: ...
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 ...