SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 14 May 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.
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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Voûte, Emile
(1870-1943) Dutch-born journalist, playwright and author, in the USA most of his life; The Passport (1915), is a Near Future tale set in World War One; during the course of the action an American inventor whose Invention is a gas that ends the war. [JC]
Visual Novel
Term popularized in Japan for a text-based Videogame usually enhanced with Anime-style illustrations and audio dialogue; not to be confused or conflated with the Graphic Novel. Although marketing for visual novels (VNs) is apt to describe them as enhanced, interactive books, they might just as easily be described as Adventure games with ...
De Mar, Val
Pseudonym of Swedish-born author John W Hultberg (1872-1951), in the US from early adulthood, father of the abstract expressionist painter John Hultberg (1922-2005). He is of sf interest for Dead Men's Shoes; Or, the One Hundred Per Cent Inheritance Tax (coll of linked stories 1920), a group of stories linked by the telepsychophone, a Communications device which, as the word implies, allows various individuals to link their minds together. The ...
Haining, Peter
(1940-2007) UK anthologist, almost all of whose extremely numerous publications, beginning with Devil Worship in Britain (anth 1964) with A V Sellwood, have been in the fields of horror and fantasy (see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy for these titles); his one novel, The Hero (1973), is a Near Future political thriller about the threat of a nuclear ...
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 ...