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Thursday 12 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Alexander, Karl
(1944-2015) US film set worker – as cameraman, electrician, gaffer, grip etc – and author whose first novel was Time After Time (1979), a Time Travel romp in which Jack the Ripper evades pursuit in 1893 by stealing the Time Machine described and here constructed by H G Wells, travelling through time to 1979 San Francisco (see ...
Conklin, Groff
(1904-1968) US editor who began his career as manager of Doubleday Book Stores 1930-1934, and who intermittently held various editing positions, in and out of commercial publishing, for the rest of his life; he was, however, primarily a freelance. The first of his many sf Anthologies was The Best of Science Fiction (anth 1946; vt The Golden Age of Science Fiction 1980), a huge compendium which vied in size and potential influence with ...
Starfire
Board and counter Wargame (1979). Task Force Games (TFG). Designed by Stephen Cole. / The first edition of Starfire is a tactical space combat Wargame played on a two-dimensional map, based on a game of the same name released in 1976 by J P Publications / Eagle Games which received very limited distribution. Both the first Task Force Games version and its 1976 predecessor use an intuitive rather than a Newtonian approach ...
Dix, Maurice B
(1889-1977) UK-born businessman and author, in Canada from an early age, serving in World War One from 1914 in the Canadian Infantry, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant; mostly active in the 1930s. His contributions to the Sexton Blake Library veer unremarkably into the fantastic. A non-Sexton Blake thriller, The Flame of the Khan (1934), contains fantastic elements, including a gem with occult ...
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 ...