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
Wallis, George C
(1871-1956) UK printer (before World War One), cinema manager and author who began writing sf and historical and adventure fiction in 1895 for the penny weekly adult magazines, the first of these apparently being a serial, "Behind the Barrier: A Story of Mystery and Peril in the Antarctic Regions" in Pearson's Storyteller for 12 October 1895/concluding issue not known; around the turn of the century, he was writing for Slick journals, but around 1903 he began ...
Long, Duncan
(1949-2016) US illustrator, author and editor of a Survivalist newsletter. His first novel, Anti-Grav Unlimited (1988; vt Antigrav Unlimited 3.1 2015), features a super-competent tinker/inventor hero (see Edisonade; Invention) who – in a Post-Holocaust atmosphere almost perfectly designed to serve as an arena for his exploits ...
Carter, Chris
(1956- ) US Television and film producer and director, the central figure behind The X-Files (1993-2002), which was enormously successful, and the psychic/supernatural thriller series Millennium (1996-1999), which was not. He co-wrote the movie novelization for The X-Files: Fight the Future (see The X-Files), ...
Hickey, T Earl
(? - ) US author of The Time Chariot (1966), a modestly told Time Travel/Time Machine tale whose protagonist changes little, suffers little, but sees a reasonable amount; there is a romance element. [JC]
Engdahl, Sylvia Louise
(1933- ) US author, employed in the field of computer programming 1957-1967. Her novels, though marketed as juveniles, appeal as well to adults for their intelligence and humanity. The Elena sequence – comprising Enchantress from the Stars (1970) and The Far Side of Evil (1971) – is perhaps her best-known work. The first describes, with suggestive analogues between traditional and technological versions of crucial events (to ...
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 ...