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Sunday 15 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 ...
Bolin, M C
(? - ) US author of two Ties of genre interest. Frank Capra's Original: It's a Wonderful Life (1996), based on the 50th anniversary of the great fantasy film by Frank Capra (1897-1991), does nothing to cast light on any of the ambivalences of the great original; Armageddon (1998) unadventurously novelizes the Asteroid disaster film ...
Æ
Pseudonym, often printed as A E or AE, used by the Irish poet George William Russell (1867-1935) for all his writing. In 1886 he and William Butler Yeats helped found the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society (see Theosophy) and much of his work reflects a mystical agenda – not very coherently in the supernatural tales assembled in The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories (coll 1904), but with very much ...
Donner, Richard
Working name of Richard Donald Schwartzberg (1930-2021), US Television and Cinema director and producer whose early genre or genre-adjacent work for the small screen included directing six episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) – including the famous "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (11 October 1963) written by Richard Matheson – ...
Rath, E J
Joint pseudonym of authors Chauncey Corey Brainerd (1874-1922) and Edith Rathbone Jacobs Brainerd (1885-1922), a married couple who died simultaneously when the Knickerbocker Theatre roof collapsed onto them. In the Near Future The Sixth Speed (1910) a disgruntled inventor applies his Invention – a yacht capable of carrying a substantial cargo at 120mph indefinitely – to piracy on the high seas, but is ...
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 ...