SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Lyons, Joseph
(1847-1917) UK inventor, caterer (founder of Lyons Corner Houses), and author of The Master Crime (1907) with Cecil Raleigh, a Near Future tale involving an anarchist destabilization of Britain, causing the Bank of England to close its doors. Lyons was knighted in 1911. [JC]
Moriarty, Chris
(1968- ) US author whose Spin sequence of high-tech Space Operas – comprising Spin State (2003), Spin Control (2006), which won the Philip K Dick Award in 2007, and Ghost Spin (2013) – expertly embeds genuinely hard Hard SF concepts in a narrative dominated by a fast-mouthed female protagonist named Li with ...
Peel, Colin D
(1936-2013) UK author of two undemanding Space Operas for Robert Hale Limited, Hell Seed (1979) and Glimpse of Forever (1980). [JC]
Meredith, Richard C
(1937-1979) US author who began publishing sf with "The Slugs" for Knight magazine in November 1962. His first novel, The Sky Is Filled with Ships (1969), is an effective Space Opera in which colonies revolt against a tyrannical corporation. We All Died at Breakaway Station (January-March 1969 Amazing; 1969) is a bleak, well-crafted space opera in a kind of Alamo setting, where a scarred ...
Heroclix
Miniature models based Wargame (2002). WizKids. Designed by Jordan Weisman, Seth Johnson. / HeroClix is a Collectible Miniatures Game based on Superhero Comics. Players purchase prepainted figures and then assemble teams with which to act out superpowered battles on printed maps. The figures are ingeniously designed, using a dial in the base ...
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 ...