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.
Site updated on 12 May 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Flash Fiction
A currently popular term for very short stories, formerly known as short-shorts or vignettes. Definitions vary; the acceptable length may approach 1000 words but is generally much less. Several publishers of Print Magazines liked short-shorts as a means of filling awkward spaces; they have grown more rather than less popular in the online twenty-first century, where Twitter users were long accustomed to compress significant meaning into 140-character tweets. ...
Mergl, Václav
(1935- ) Czechoslovakian animator, artist, writer and director; graduate of VŠUP (the College of Applied Arts, Prague). His films were usually made for Krátký Film (later Krátký Film Praha a.s.). / Mergl used stop-motion techniques – both cut-outs and claymation – as well standard 2D animation, including woodcut-like illustrations; his films sometimes use a mixture of these styles. After a couple of experimental ...
Xu Zhuodai
Pen-name of Xu Fulin (1880-circa 1958), who flourished as a humorist during the 1920s in the cosmopolitan Chinese city of Shanghai, gaining the sobriquet Huaji Dafu ["The Master of Laughter"]. Among his other professions, he ran a school for acrobats, was a sometime playwright and translator, dabbled in the nascent film business, and even set up a soy sauce factory. / Among his many works of film reviews, essays and short stories, Yingxixue ...
Wright, Stephen
(1946- ) US author who remains best known for Meditations in Green (1983), a nonfantastic novel set in Vietnam; he is of direct sf interest for M31: A Family Romance (1988),a Fabulation in an agglutinative style reminiscent of that used by William Gaddis (1922-1998) in The Recognitions (1955). Abandoned by their parents – Dot and Dash, who claim to be Aliens descended ...
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 ...