SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 28 March 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 27 March 2023
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
Grant, Mark
A House Name used by David Bischoff, Bruce King and Tim Sullivan for the Mutants Amok sequence opening with Mutants Amok (1991). Bischoff and Sullivan wrote #1-#4 in collaboration; King wrote #5 solo. [JC]
Benson, A C
Working name for much of his copious magazine output of Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925), UK essayist, poet and author, elder brother of E F Benson and Robert Hugh Benson; best known as A C Benson though often his books would give this form of his name on the cover while the full name appeared on the title page; he also wrote as Arthur C Benson and as B. Much of his short fiction was fantasy, and can be found in ...
Scientists
Scientists in pre-twentieth-century sf often exhibited symptoms of social maladjustment, sometimes to the point of insanity; they were characteristically obsessive and antisocial. Some scientists were quasidiabolical figures, like Coppelius in E T A Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" ["The Sandman"] (comprising volume one of Nachtstücke, 1816) or Mary Shelley's eponymous ...
Speculative Fiction
Item of Terminology used by some writers and critics in place of "science fiction". Its first known use is by the reviewer M F Egan in "Book-Talk" (October 1899 Lippincott's Monthly Magazine), which describes Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) as "speculative fiction". In the symposium published as Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing (anth 1947) edited by ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...