SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 11 November 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 10 November 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Corbett, James
(1887-1958) UK author who served as a lieutenant in the armed forces during World War One and wrote popular thrillers for the lending-library market from 1929 to 1951. Corbett's sf tales, beginning with The White Angel (1931), are as sensational as his thrillers. The Man Who Saw the Devil (1934) is a rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ...
Banks, Michael A
Pseudonym of US author and editor Alan Gould (1951-2023), long active in Cincinnati Fandom, who began publishing sf as Banks with "Lost & Found" with George Wagner in Asimov's for March/April 1978, and who has since published at least forty-five stories, some as Alan Gould. His first books of sf interest were the nonfiction Understanding Science Fiction (1982), a primer with examples – mostly his own stories – ...
Zelazny, Roger
(1937-1995) US author and poet, born in Ohio, with an MA from Columbia University in 1962. In 1962-1969 he was employed by the Social Security Administration in Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland; from 1969 he wrote full-time. His arrival in the sf world in 1962, at the same time as Samuel R Delany, Thomas M Disch and Ursula K Le Guin, marked that year as a milestone in what seemed ...
Introduction to the First Edition
Basically, there are two ways of researching a reference book. The first, and unhappily perhaps the more common, is for the compilers to cannibalize previous reference books for information. The trouble with this system, apart from a certain unfairness to pioneer workers who are sometimes not even credited, although heavily copied, is that it tends to repeat mistakes: actual errors are sometimes carried through four or five books until finally, because of the "authority" of the printed word, ...
Steam Engine Time
Australian Fanzine, edited and published by Bruce Gillespie (Melbourne, Australia); co-edited with Maureen Kincaid Speller and Paul Kincaid (Folkestone, England) for issues #1-#3; thereafter with Janine G Stinson (Michigan, USA). A4 photo-offset. Average length 50pp. Thirteen issues 2000-2012. / Steam Engine Time ...
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 ...