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Wednesday 11 March 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 9 March 2026
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Knowles, W P
(1891-1978) UK advocate of the Knowles method of breath training and author, in active service during World War One. His Scientific Romance Jim McWhirter (1933), the last portion of which is set in 1953, advances, accompanied by considerable philosophical debate, towards a not unusual socialist Utopia where Sex is a form of hygiene, via a sequence of very ...
Tom Swift
Hero of a Juvenile Series of scientific-invention novels produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, constituting a central example of the importance and persistence of the Edisonade in boys' fiction, and written under the House Name Victor Appleton, most being the work of Howard R Garis. ...
Milne, Janis
(? - ) UK author of a Young Adult Space Opera, The Starship Dunroamin' (1987), in which a gimmicked washing machine converts an inner-city English house into a Spaceship. [JC]
Barfield, Owen
(1898-1997) UK author and philologist who served in World War One; his first book, The Silver Trumpet (1925), is Fantasy. He was long involved with the Anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). A member of the Inklings group and a long-time associate of C S Lewis, Barfield contributed to Essays Presented to Charles Williams (anth ...
Positronic Robots
Because Isaac Asimov's Robot stories are so celebrated, this term is one of the best known in the genre; it is not, however, a generally used item of sf Terminology, few writers having had the cheek to borrow the idea from its inventor – although H Beam Piper went one better in "Graveyard of Dreams" (February 1958 Galaxy) with a ...
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 ...