SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 March 2026
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 9 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Alan Parsons Project, The
UK prog-rock band founded by Alan Parsons (1948- ) and Eric Woolfson (1945-2009). Parsons worked as a record producer, and remains best-known today as the sound engineer of Pink Floyd's album Dark Side of the Moon (1974); there is, indeed, an inescapably sub-Floyd feel to most of the work released by his own band. Each of the ten Alan Parsons Project albums develops a single "concept", often science-fictional, through a number ...
Thompson, Trudy
(? - ) US author of the romantic Planetary Romance Prisoner of Passion (1995), set in the Far Future of a planet that may be Earth, now a world that has been divided into three portions by the Ancient Ones. There are some resemblance to E R Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Hostage Hearts (2006) is a romantic ...
Marsden, John
(1950-2024) Australian author for children and Young Adult markets, much of whose work is of Fantasy interest, beginning with his first novel, The Journey (1988), but who is of sf interest primarily for his Tomorrow sequence, comprising Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993), The Dead of the Night (1994), The Third Day, the Frost (1995; vt ...
Tachyons
There is an only half-facetious precept in Physics stating that "anything which is not prohibited is compulsory". Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk and E C George Sudarshan suggested in 1962, and Gerald Feinberg in 1967, that the idea of a particle that can only travel Faster Than Light does not violate any of the basic maxims of Relativistic physics. Such a hypothetical particle (a tachyon, as opposed to ...
Bell, Anthea
(1936-2018) UK translator from the French, German and Danish; perhaps best known for her idiomatic versions of the Asterix Comics mostly written by René Goscinny (1926-1977); the unceasing flow of puns throughout the thirty-five volumes released before her retirement in 2013 are almost always hers. Her translations of the work of W G Sebald (1944-2001), most notably of his penetrating Austerlitz (2001), transparently demonstrate how ...
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 ...