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Wednesday 11 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Black, Christopher
(? - ) Pseudonymous US author – real name unknown – of the short-lived Star Challenge Choose-Your-Own-Plot series of interplanetary adventure Gamebooks; some readers have found the Robot amusing. [JC]
Koster, Raph
(1971- ) US Game designer who has primarily worked on persistent Online Worlds. Koster's first major contributions were made to the free-to-play Heroic Fantasy Multi User Dungeon LegendMUD (1994 Mainframe, Net), of which he was one of the designers. He was later hired as lead designer for Ultima Online (1997), ...
Wilson, David Alec
(1864-1933) Scottish civil servant (often in India) and author, much of whose career was devoted to defensive studies of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881); of Modern Lilliput: A History of the Recent Re-Discovery of the Lilliput Archipelago, and What Has Been Happening There (1924), (see Jonathan Swift), a Lost Race tale in which the hidden Island, now rediscovered, proves to boast high ...
Starzl, R F
(1899-1976) US journalist and author who between 1928 and 1934 had 24 stories published in the Pulp magazines, written primarily as a means of financing his family newspaper, the LeMars Globe-Post, of which he became the proprietor. Most of Starzl's stories are competently written but became increasingly formulaic, though he was especially good at creating different types of Monsters. His first story is his best remembered, "Out of ...
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 ...