SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 July 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 7 July 2025
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Vonarburg, Élisabeth
(1947- ) French-born Canadian teacher, editor, critic and author, in Quebec from 1973, naturalized 1976. She was fiction editor 1979-1990 and editor 1983-1985 of Solaris; and began publishing sf with "Marée haute" for Requiem in 1978; the tale appeared as "High Tide" in Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (anth 1979) edited by Maxim Jakubowski. Many of her stories (some ...
Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake
US animated tv series (2023). Frederator Studios, Cartoon Network Studios. Based on Adventure Time (2007; 2010-2018; 2020-2021) created by Pendleton Ward and the characters Fionna and Cake created by Natasha Allegri. Developed by Adam Muto. Directed by Ryann Shannon and Steve Wolfhard. Writers include Anthony Burch, Adam Muto, Hanna K. Nyström, Jack Pendarvis and Kate Tsang. Voice cast includes Felicia Day, Donald Glover, Tom ...
Spencer, Wen
Pseudonym of US author Wendy Kosak (1963- ) whose work typically interfuses fantasy, weird fiction and sf, sometimes gaining Equipoisal sharpness through the process. She began to publish with her first series – the Ukia Oregon sequence comprising Alien Taste (2001), which won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award for best first novel, ...
Westall, William
(1835-1903) UK author and journalist, resident for much of his life in Switzerland, where he served as foreign correspondent for The Times of London; he also travelled in South America and elsewhere. The explorer protagonist of The Phantom City: A Volcanic Romance (1886) travels by Balloon to a Lost-World race of Incans hidden in a Guatemalan volcano, where they maintain a pre-Conquest level of civilization. ...
Essex House
A short-lived (1968-1969) Los Angeles publishing imprint, a subsidiary of Milton Luros's Parliament News, Inc, specializing in highbrow erotica. Many Essex House novelists were young serious writers (several of them poets), and some used scenarios drawn from sf and fantasy, including future Dystopias, as settings for their pornography. About half the 42 titles published by Essex House were sf/fantasy; they included novels by Philip José ...
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 ...