SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Night of the Big Heat
Film (1967; vt Island of the Burning Damned). Planet. Directed by Terence Fisher. Written by Ronald Liles, Pip Baker, Jane Baker, based on The Night of the Big Heat (1959) by John Lymington. Cast includes Patrick Allen, Peter Cushing, Sarah Lawson, Christopher Lee and Jane Merrow. 97 minutes, cut to 94 minutes. Colour. / An island off the UK coast experiences a freak heatwave, during which there are a number of mysterious ...
Greeno, Gayle
(1949- ) US author of two connected series of Planetary Romances: the Ghatti's Tale sequence beginning with The Ghatti's Tale: Book One: Finders-Seekers (1993) and the Ghatten's Gambit sequence ending with The Farthest Seeking (2000). On the abandoned colony planet of Methuen, various categories of being – including the unsurprisingly Cat-like Ghatti, who are ...
Peake, Mervyn
(1911-1968) UK poet, artist and author, born in China, where he lived until he was twelve in a missionary compound, embedded into a land as strange to Western eyes as the country surrounding Gormenghast. He was initially better regarded as an artist than as a writer and, although he had published several volumes of Poetry during and after World War Two, the poetic density of Titus Groan (1946) was unexpected. Gormenghast (1950) is closely ...
Dashner, James
(1972- ) US author whose work has been restricted to three Young Adult series, the first of which, The Jimmy Fincher Saga, beginning with A Door in the Woods (2003), is fantasy. The 13th Reality sequence, beginning with The Journal of Curious Letters (2008), sets its young protagonist the sf-coloured task of protecting the vast number of Alternate Worlds created ...
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 ...