SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 September 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 7 September 2026
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Larson, Glen A
(1937-2014) US singer/songwriter, beginning in 1956 with The Four Preps; and Television producer, perhaps best known as producer of Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979), the eponymous dreadnought having some characteristics of an extremely small World Ship in Mormon dress. However, Larson had been long involved with television previously, being responsible for Quincy, ...
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Film (2017). Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company) presents a Marvel Studios production. Directed by James Gunn. Written by Gunn from the Marvel Comics Guardians of the Galaxy (25 issues, June 2008-August 2010) by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning: the "Guardians of the Galaxy" first appeared in Annihilation: Conquest #6 (April 2008). Cast ...
China
For a general note on this encyclopedia's handling of Chinese names, please see Editorial Practices: Chinese and Japanese Names. / Chinese literature has a long tradition of the fantastic that prepared the way for, and leads up to, modern Chinese sf. Like modernism itself, the sf genre reached China through the unexpected route of Japanese contacts, in particular the foreign studies of the author Lu ...
Metamorphosis Alpha
Role Playing Game (1976). Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Designed by James Ward (1951-2024). / Metamorphosis Alpha was the first science fiction RPG. It is set on a Generation Starship (the "Warden") which has suffered an unspecified disaster many years in the game's past, a concept inspired by Brian Aldiss's novel ...
Zone
Within the fictional worlds of sf stories or novels, whenever a space of some unusual properties is found, it can be defined as the zone. A zone's most characteristic feature is the way it differs from and interacts with the world around it. Sf most frequently depicts realities dissimilar to or even distant from that of readers' empirical experience, but no matter how surprising they seem, they are customarily based on a set of irrefutable yet decodable rules to be concretized in the course 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 ...