SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 July 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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["Nijūyo-nen-gumi"] Critical shorthand used in Japanese Manga Fandom and academia to describe the community of female creators who transformed girls' comics in the 1970s, making a striking and enduring impact on multiple genres, including sf (see Women SF Writers). The name derives from the happenstance that several of the prime movers in the field were born in or around ...
Duckworth, Marilyn
(1935- ) New Zealand author and poet, in UK with her family from 1939 to 1947, whose novel A Gap in the Spectrum (1959) is a tale of disorientation and perhaps Amnesia or false memory. The nineteen-year-old female protagonist awakes in London with a sense that the City and the world are unfamiliar; that she hails from another country called ...
Carter, Paul A
(1926-2016) US social historian and author who began publishing sf with "The Last Objective" in Astounding for August 1946. His occasional stories over the next decades showed that, had he wished, he could have made writing his primary career. In his critical study The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction (coll 1977) he demonstrated an intimate and sophisticated knowledge of the field. With Gregory ...
Kipling, Rudyard
(1865-1936) UK journalist, poet and author known mainly for such works outside the sf field as Plain Tales from the Hills (coll 1888) – which does contain some supernatural tales – and Kim (1901) [see below]; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. During World War One, a conflict he had named "The Great War" as early as 1899, he wrote a great deal of propaganda, but the loss of his ...
Lavers, Norman
(1935- ) US ornithologist, academic and author whose sf novel, The Northwest Passage (1984), engages in an experiment (see Postmodernism) familiar to readers of the modern novel: the book comprises a "text", complete with a scholarly apparatus which is itself, of course, part of the "text". In this case, a far-future editorial apparatus surrounds (see Ruins and Futurity) the ...
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 ...