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Monday 13 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.
Site updated on 13 April 2026
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Weinberg, Robert E
(1946-2016) US editor, publisher, bookseller and author of Fanzines – in particular Pulp 1970-1981 – focusing on his main interest, the Pulp-magazine world. Much of his task as an editor and publisher was to rediscover and reprint magazine stories from the pulps which might otherwise have disappeared utterly. Though he began to publish fiction of genre interest with "Destroyer" in If for May 1969, ...
Forest, Louis
Pseudonym of French lawyer, politician, playwright and author Louis Nathan (1872-1933), who is of sf interest for On Vole des Enfants à Paris ["We Steal Children in Paris"] (25 June-23 September 1906 Le Matin as "Le Voleur d'enfants"; cut 1909; trans Brian Stableford as Someone Is Stealing Children in Paris 2013), in which a morally ambivalent figure of German origin is enlisted to solve the mysterious kidnapping ...
Brede, Arnold
Pseudonym of a UK author (? - ) whose identity has not been discovered, or possibly a Scion House Name; three crime novels were published under this name, and the unremarkable Sister Earth (1951), about a Counter-Earth on the other side of the Sun: '... because of the brilliance of the Sun's light, many astral bodies beyond it have never been seen ...
Multiverse
Term originally coined outside sf as an alternative to "universe" that supposedly avoided any presupposition of a unique and ordered creation. Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), collected in his Will to Believe (coll 1897): "Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe." This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William ...
Dune [series]
The best-known sf sequence by Frank Herbert, whose opening novel Dune (December 1963-February 1964 Analog as "Dune World"; January-May 1965 Analog as "The Prophet of Dune"; fixup 1965) offers a heady mixture of desert Ecology – in particular the complex life cycle of the titular world's immense, devouring sandworms – galactic ...
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 ...