SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 April 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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Jay, Peter
(1937-2024) UK author, economist and former diplomat who served as the UK Ambassador to the USA 1977-1979. His Future History Apocalypse 2000: Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of Democracy (1987) with Michael Stewart, was inefficient as fiction but acute about the pleasures and miseries of late capitalism, which is portrayed as being consumed by debt; that a despicable populist named Olaf D Le Rith (ie ...
Heine, Irving
(? - ) Unidentified and perhaps pseudonymous author (probably UK) whose only book credit is for Dimension of Illion (1955). Heine was long thought to be one of the many Pseudonyms of Denis Hughes, who however denied this when interviewed by Steve Holland. [SH/DRL] see also: ...
Casteret, Norbert
(1897-1987) French speleologist and author, in active service during World War One; he had already begun caving in 1912 and discovered a number of important sites, including at least one containing prehistoric paintings; most of his writings are devoted to his profession. His sf novel, Mission centre terre (1964; trans Antonia Ridge and rev as Mission Underground 1968), sends explorers several miles ...
History of SF
Sf is an impure genre (see Definitions of SF) which did not finally take shape until the late nineteenth century, although all its separate elements existed earlier. If the labelling of any earlier story as sf depended only on the presence of sf elements there would be many such. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, has a Fantastic Voyage and a great world-flood (see ...
Mystery Comics
US Comic (1944). Four issues. Wm H Wise & Co. Artists include Ken Battefield, Bob Oksner and Alex Schomburg. Script writers include Joseph Greene and Bob Stanwood. 5 strips per issue. / The stories featuring Superhero Brad Spencer, Wonderman are published in the wrong order: narratively the sequence is #2, #3, #4 and #1. Brad's "body was made tough as ...
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 ...