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Saturday 12 July 2025
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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Taber, Deb
(? - ) US editor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "How to Raise a Human" in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest for Fall 2006, which evokes Horror in SF. Her first novel, Necessary Ill (2013), depicts a morally ambiguous Near Future America where problems of Overpopulation and the exhaustion of planetary ...
Gravity
The force of gravity is the most inescapable and unvarying fact of terrestrial life, and when writers first sent characters into Spaceships and on to other planets the phenomenon of low gravity, or of no gravity at all, figured prominently among the wonders of space. Many early authors did not realize that complete weightlessness is a consequence of free fall, but this soon became a fact to be taken for granted in describing ...
Lee, Carole Ann
(? - ) US author of the Banner sequence of romantic Space Operas beginning with Banner's Bonus (1995), about Nick Banner's interstellar adventures, initially on a flight to save his industrial czar boss's daughter from a kidnap threat. Solar Wind (2008) features similar adventures, though Banner is missing; Banner's Renegade (2020) assembles the entire crew. Sexual ...
Berneri, Marie Louise
(1918-1949) Italian-born political activist, editor, journalist and author, mostly in France until early adulthood, from 1937 in the UK. She co-founded in 1939 and edited the anti-war anarchist journal War Commentary until 1945, when she and her co-editors were put on trial for "incitement to disaffection". She is of sf interest for Journey Through Utopia (1950), a cogent historical traversal of significant authors, from Plato to Aldous ...
Cher, Marie
Working name of author Marie Scherr (1865-? ), whose nationality has not been securely identified; she may have been French. Her maiden name is recorded as being Schvarzberg, and she published at least one book in France in the late nineteenth century. Her later works all seem to have been written in English. The Immortal Gymnasts (1915) is a Fantasy of Manners setting figures from the Commedia dell'Arte into the contemporary world [for Commedia dell'Arte and ...
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 ...