SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 12 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
Sponsor of the day: Kees van Toorn and LAcon V
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 ...
Clear Horizon, The
US television series (1960-1962). CBS Television Network. Created by Manya Starr. Writers included Starr, Carol Warner Gluck, and Irving Vendig. Cast included Phyllis Avery, William Berger, Beau Bridges, Ed Kemmer, Ted Knight, Eve McVeigh, Lee Meriwether, and William Roerick. 254 episodes. Black and white. / This daily soap opera, first performed live and taped when it was revived, involved the lives of astronauts in the American space programme residing in Cape Canaveral, Florida. ...
X Series, The
Videogame series (from 1999). Egosoft. / The X Series is a line of Space Sims, descended from Elite (1984). The player has considerable freedom to explore, trade, mine asteroids, fight pirates (or become one), carry out missions (including bounty-hunting and passenger transport), or create a commercial empire of space-based factories and fleets of starships. The game universe itself is ...
South Korea
(For sf activity before 1945, see the entry for pre-partition Korea.) / In South Korea, literary circles of the 1950s and 1960s generally favored realist, socially engaged fiction as the preferred vehicle for articulating political critique and cultural resistance, often viewing genre fiction – particularly sf – as escapist or didactic. As a result, native sf was typically relegated to the realm of juvenile literature, its educational function ...
Comets
Small, normally icy bodies of our solar system whose appearance during close approach to the Sun can be spectacular owing to heating and outgassing effects producing the coma (a visible local atmosphere surrounding the central nucleus) and long tail of dust and gas blown outward from the sun by the Solar Wind. Owing to this visibility and the regular return of short-period comets – whose home is in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit ...
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 ...