SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 12 December 2025
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 11 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Hall, Robert Lee
(1941- ) US author and high-school teacher whose first novel, Exit Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective's Final Days (1977; rev 1977), purports to be a lost Watson manuscript telling more about the relationship of Holmes and Moriarty. As in David Dvorkin's later Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983), Time Travel fuels the plot as Watson plumbs the mystery of ...
Myers, Howard L
(1930-1971) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Reluctant Weapon" in Galaxy for December 1952, and who published a number of tales over the next decade or so, usually as by Verge Foray; his only novel, Cloud Chamber (1977), attractively combines Cosmology, Antimatter invaders of our Universe, Sex and effortless rebirth of all sentient beings ...
Wimpfen, Sheldon
(1913-2003) US mining engineer and author whose sf novel, The Pringle Progression: Smaller/Fewer: a Novel (1998), describes a Near Future world devastated by Overpopulation as a young couple, a doctor and an engineer, attempt to discover a solution for the inability of Homo sapiens to stop breeding. The earlier Tin Peaks & Silver Streams (1995) is a memoir. [JC]
Rome, Alger
Collaborative pseudonym used by Jerome Bixby and Algis Budrys, on "Underestimation" (September 1953 Rocket Stories). [PN] links / Internet Speculative Fiction Database
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 ...