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Friday 13 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.
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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 ...
KULT: The Temple of Flying Saucers
Videogame (1989; vt Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess in the US). ERE Informatique. Designed by "Arbeit von Spacekraft" (Johan Robson). Platforms: Amiga, AtariST, DOS. / In the future of The Temple of Flying Saucers, humanity has split into three distinct subspecies after a (presumably nuclear) apocalypse: the Psionically gifted Tuners, the physically mutated Protozorqs and the unaltered Normals. The player ...
Bégouën, Max
(1893-1961) French prehistorian and author of three Prehistoric SF tales, of which only Les bisons d'argile (1925; trans Robert Luther Duffus as Bison of Clay 1926) has appeared in English; it speculatively depicts the life of prehistoric totem-worshipping humans in the foothills of the Pyrenees (see Origin of Man). Bégouën's entry for the Prix Jules Verne (see ...
Scarborough, Dorothy
(1878-1935) Working name of Emily Dorothy Scarborough, US author best known for her novels about the contemporary American southwest, most notably The Wind (1925), a hauntingly surreal portrait of a woman maddened by listening to the Texas winds. While she edited two volumes of ghost stories (see Eschatology; Supernatural Creatures), Famous Modern Ghost Stories (1921) and ...
Friedman, C S
(1957- ) US costume designer (until 1996) and author who sometimes writes as Celia or Celia S Friedman; much of her work is fantasy. Her first fiction, though, the Azean Empire sequence comprising In Conquest Born (1987) and The Wilding (2004), is a far-flung interstellar Space Opera; Planetary Romance elements surface when the two main vying civilizations – ...
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 ...