SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 2 June 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 29 May 2023
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Scheerbart, Paul
(1863-1915) German author, who also wrote as by Kuno Küfer; most of his sf and fantasy remained untranslated until the twenty-first century. Lesabéndio: Ein Asteroiden-Roman Mit 14 Strichätzungen von Alfred Kubin auf Tafeln (1913; trans Christina Svendsen as Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel 2012) is a Utopia set far from our solar system in a planetoid called Pallas; the eponymous ...
Ruth, Rod
(1912-1987) Working name of American artist Rodney Ruth. After growing up in a rustic area near Lake Michigan, which inspired a lifelong devotion to nature, Ruth moved to Chicago to receive artistic training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, the Frederick Mizen School of Arts, and the Institute of Design. Some freelance work eventually led to regular employment as a staff artist for the Chicago-based Ziff-Davis magazines, which included the sf magazines ...
War
This very broad theme permeates large areas of sf, and is principally dealt with in this encyclopedia under the heading Future War. The historical World War One and World War Two have their own more specific entries, as does the dominant latter-twentieth-century nightmare that never in fact achieved reality, the nuclear Holocaust of ...
Sebold, Gaie
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Fire by Night" in Legends for October 2002. Most of her work has been fantasy, including the Babylon Steel sequence beginning with Babylon Steel (2011; vt Bad Gods 2022) whose protagonist, who runs a brothel in the City of Scalentine, finds herself involved in noirish efforts to keep its fragile government afloat. The ...
Quinn, Seabury
(1889-1969) American lawyer and weird-fiction author whose first published story was "The Law of the Movies" (December 1917 The Motion Picture Magazine). Seabury Quinn was by far the most prolific contributor to Weird Tales; during its 31-year life he published well over a hundred stories there, appearing on average in roughly every other issue. Many of these contributions – 93 in all – featured his occult detective Jules de Grandin ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...