SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 July 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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Giancola, Donato
(1967- ) American artist, at times credited simply as Donato. After initially studying engineering in college, Giancola shifted his focus to art, obtaining a BFA in painting from Syracuse University College of Visual Arts in 1992. Almost immediately, he began receiving assignments to paint covers for major publishers, including Tor Books and Ace Books, creatively employing his classical training to depict ...
Meijer, Eva
(1980- ) Dutch philosopher, activist, singer-songwriter and author, active from before 2010, much of whose work, fiction and nonfiction, remains untranslated into English. Their first translated novel, the nonfantastic Het vogelhuis (2016; trans Antoinette Fawcett as Bird Cottage 2018), fictionalizes the life of the historical naturalist Len Howard (1894-1973) in rural East Sussex. Meijer is of sf interest for Zee Nu (2022; trans ...
Johnston, Bryan
(? - ) US screenwriter, producer and author; his sf novel Death Warrant (2022) unveils an homage to Robert Sheckley's The Tenth Victim (full version 1966) through its depiction of a young woman who agrees to be killed on a reality show (see Media Landscape; Television), but without knowing that a ...
Pares, Bip
Working name of UK illustrator Ethel Pares (1904-1977); the "Bip" came from her childhood attempt to pronounce the name of a family horse. From 1928 for some years, she executed posters for London Transport; most of her circa 600 dustjackets were done before World War Two, often for works of genre interest: much of this work continues to await discovery. Some of her best designs appeared on the covers of sf novels, such as E Phillips Oppenheim's ...
Rossow, William B
(1947- ) US climatologist with NASA and author, with Marjorie Bradley Kellogg (whom see for details) of the Lear's Daughters sequence of sf novels, which have much to do with violent spasms of weather on an Alien planet visited by inept human Scientists and less inept human planet-developers: rival AI ...
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 ...