SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 19 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Schneider, Robert
(1961- ) Austrian playwright and author whose first novel, Schlafes Bruder (1992; trans Shaun Whiteside as Brother of Sleep 1995), edges into sf-tinted Fantastika through the life of its protagonist, Jophannes Elias Alder, a nineteenth-century musical prodigy (see Music) whose precocious compositions are made possible through what might be described as a ...
Murray, W H H
(1840-1904) US minister and author who published some religious nonfiction as by William H H Murray. His Mamelons series beginning with The Doom of Mamelons: A Legend of the Saguenay (1888) describes the history and fate of an American tribe which turns out not to be of "Indian" stock, but comprises the Lost Race remnants of the ancient Basque civilization that had previously populated Atlantis. They live ...
Orbit Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine, published by Hanro Corp, New York; edited by Jules Saltman. Five issues [Fall] 1953 to November/December 1954, the first two undated. All stories were chosen by Donald A Wollheim, uncredited. Orbit Science Fiction was a middling-quality magazine that fell victim to the inundation of the market with too many sf magazines in the early 1950s. A story in the Tex Harrigan series by August ...
Powers, Tim
(1952- ) US author properly thought of as fundamentally a writer of fantasy, but who began his publishing career with two sf novels, the first being The Skies Discrowned (1976 as Timothy Powers; rev vt Forsake the Sky 1986 as Tim Powers), a fantasy-tinged adventure much influenced – as Powers stated in his introduction to the revised version – by the work of Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950). The second, Epitaph in Rust ...
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 ...