SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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.
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Smith, E E
(1890-1965) US food chemist specializing in doughnut mixes, and author, often called the "Father of Space Opera"; because Hugo Gernsback appended "PhD" to Smith's name for his contributions to Amazing from 1928, he also became known as "Doc" Smith. Greatly influential in US Pulp-magazine sf between 1928 and about 1945, and having become involved in American ...
Metaphysics
One of the qualities of sf that sometimes baffles new readers is the relative infrequency, despite its label, with which it deals with the hard sciences; indeed, sf deals as often with metaphysics as with Physics. This is not an accidental or a recent development; the exploration of metaphysical questions has been central to sf at least since the time of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus ...
Monster of Piedras Blancas, The
US film (1959). Vanwick Productions. Directed by Irvin Berwick. Written by H Haile Chace. Cast includes Frank Arvidson, Jeanne Carmen, Pete Dunn, John Harmon, Forrest Lewis, Don Sullivan and Les Tremayne. 71 minutes. Black and white. / Misanthropic widower Mr Sturges (Harmon) will angrily warn off any passers-by who get too close to his lighthouse; set on the mainland, this is but a short distance from a coastal town. Here we see a group of locals staring into a small boat, where two ...
School-Live!
Japanese animated tv series (2015); original title Gakkō Gurashi! Based on the Manga by Sadoru Chiba and Norimitsu Kaihō. Lerche. Directed by Masaomi Ando. Written by Norimitsu Kaihō. Voice cast includes Mao Ichimichi, Ai Kayano, Inori Minase, Ari Ozawa and Rie Takahashi. Twelve 24-minute episodes. Colour. / Yuki Takeya (Minase) loves school so much she lives there: the first episode has her happily mingling ...
Futrelle, Jacques
(1875-1912) US author and theatrical manager, on the editorial staff of the Boston American; he was one of four authors of sf (the others are John Jacob Astor, F D Millet and W T Stead) known to have gone down with the Titanic. The stories assembled in his Thinking Machine collections about the scientific detective Professor Augustus S F X Van Dusen ...
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 ...