SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Toward the Terra
Japanese animated tv series (2007); original title Chikyū e ... ["To Terra"]. Based on the Manga by Keiko Takemiya. Produced by Minamimachi Bugyōsho and Tokyo Kids. Directed by Osamu Yamazaki. Voice cast includes Mitsuki Saiga and Takehito Koyasu. 24 25-minute episodes. Colour / This Space Opera series covers several decades of events, jumping back ...
Meredith, Geoffrey
(? - ) UK author of a Near Future sf novel for older children, The Radium Rebels (1946), in which a vein of hyper-rich radium (see Elements) allows its discoverer, a megalomaniac Mad Scientist, to invent various Weapons – including Ray guns and thousands of radium-driven one-person winged ...
Spacesuit Films
Spacesuit films, as defined by the critic who has promoted the term, Gary Westfahl, are those space films that endeavour to plausibly portray the harsh conditions and novel features of life in outer space and on other planets – such as the absence of air, zero or low Gravity, and dangerous radiation – as most prominently indicated by the fact that their characters constantly wear, or are in close proximity to, protective ...
Paine, Lauran
(1916-2001) US stunt rider, rancher and author, extraordinarily prolific in several fields, active from the mid 1940s, with more than 900 novels under his own name and 69 identified pseudonyms from 1950 until the mid-1990s, almost always for Robert Hale Limited. Over 600 of these were Westerns, many of them achieving a level of genuine competence; a relative handful of them were sf, which he wrote without particular ...
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 ...