SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 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 7 July 2026
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Russell, Mary Doria
(1950- ) US paleo-anthropologist and author who established a strong reputation for cognitive subtlety and narrative power in her brief sf career; after the Emilio Sandoz sequence – comprising The Sparrow (1996), her first novel, which won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the BSFA Award, the James Tiptree Jr Award, and inspired the ...
Coma
Film (1978). MGM. Directed by Michael Crichton. Written by Crichton, based on Coma (1977) by Robin Cook. Cast includes Genevieve Bujold, Michael Douglas, Rip Torn and Richard Widmark. 113 minutes. Colour. / Crichton's most commercially successful film, Coma is a present-day thriller with one sf element: the use of hospital patients, deliberately put into irreversible coma by using poisoned ...
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
US Digest-size magazine; published Fall 1949 to the present. The first issue was titled simply The Magazine of Fantasy. Until February 1958 published by Fantasy House, Inc, a subsidiary of Mercury Publications, then by Mercury Press until January 2001, then by Gordon Van Gelder's Spilogale, Inc; Lawrence E Spivak (1900-1994) was Publisher from Fall 1949 to July 1954, Joseph W Ferman ...
Fantasy Magazine
1. A variant title (December 1933 to January 1937) of the celebrated Fanzine or Amateur Magazine (which see) Science Fiction Digest, founded 1932, of which Julius Schwartz was one of the editors. This in turn had incorporated The Time Traveller, often regarded as the first true fanzine (January 1932 #1), which Schwartz had published ...
Wilde, Fran
(1972- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Everlasting" in Daily Science Fiction for 5 September 2011. Her shorter works are often sf, though sometimes Equipoisally, like "How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age" (April 2015 Asimov's), where a high-tech Perception monitor "embeds" user in ...
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 ...