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Saturday 11 April 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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Waltermire, Beecher W
(1858-1932) US lawyer and author, father of the weird fiction author Arthur B Waltermire (1888-1938); he is of some sf interest for The Adventure of a Skeleton: A Tale of Natural Gas (1890), whose abnormally thin protagonist manages to slip down an oil well into the Hollow Earth, where he finds a fantasy-tinged world, and has adventures there. [JC]
Herbert, Frank
(1920-1986) US author born in Tacoma, Washington, and educated at the University of Washington, Seattle; he was Brian Herbert's father. Herbert worked as a reporter and editor on a number of West Coast newspapers before becoming a full-time writer. He lived in Washington State. / He began publishing sf with "Looking for Something?" in Startling Stories for April 1952, and during the next decade was an infrequent ...
Online Newszines
Most current sf print Newszines (which see) have an associated online news presence in blog or website form. Below is a selection, culled from the Ansible links page, of exclusively online sf news outlets. Some also carry reviews, interviews and other nonfiction content. [DRL] see also: Online SF Resources. / Concatenation ...
Kyne, Peter B
(1880-1957) US author, many of whose stories – at least 110 are credited – were made into films, including his first and most famous novel, The Three Godfathers (1913). Though it only hints at Near Future events, Pride of Palomar (1921) – filmed as The Pride of Palomar (1922) – is of interest for its portrayal of the Yellow Peril menace to ...
Allan, Nina
(1966- ) UK author, partner of Christopher Priest from 2011 until his death in 2024. She began to publish work of genre interest with "The Beachcomber" in Dark Horizons for June 2002; of her fifty or so stories released since, about half contain sf elements, though she was first identified as an author of horror. The interwoven tales assembled as The Silver Wind: Four Stories of Time Disrupted (coll of linked stories ...
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 ...