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Friday 13 March 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.
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Suspended Animation
The notion of suspended animation is one of the oldest literary devices in sf, by virtue of its convenience as a means of Time Travel into the future (see also Sleeper Awakes). It is used in Utopian romances like L S Mercier's Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (trans 1772), Mary Griffith's ...
Revis, Beth
(1981- ) US author of the Across the Universe sequence, beginning with Across the Universe (2011), a Generation Starship tale for the Young Adult market, whose main action occurs about half a century before reaching Alpha Centauri, after a teenage girl awakens early from Cryogenic sleep to find a complexly dysfunctional ...
Goldfrap, John Henry
(1879-1917) UK-born US journalist – his family moved to America in 1894 and settled in California – and author of various series of adventures for boys, almost always featuring two or more chums. Goldfrap always wrote under Pseudonyms. His series – only some of sf interest – include the Ocean Wireless Boys; the Boy Aviator Series of Airplane Boys stories, of which one volume, ...
Franson, Robert Wilfred
(? - ) US author of the Overflight sequence beginning with The Shadow of the Ship (1983; rev 2014), set in a universe where interstellar travel is accomplished through a kind of Parallel World desert, by caravans; a disparate group of human-like voyagers trek across this desert – demonstrating the virtues of a communal variety of libertarianism (see ...
Novum
In his important early work of sf theory, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), Yugoslav-born Professor Darko Suvin situated sf as a literary form as marked by two unusual devices: Cognitive Estrangement and the Novum. The former is distinctive in creating and understanding the imagined world as different from our own, by means of scientific observation, theorizing and empirical experiment. Such ...
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 ...