SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 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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Asteroids
The asteroids (or minor planets) mostly lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The first to be discovered was Ceres, identified by Giuseppe Piazzi (1746-1826) in 1801; three more, including Vesta and Pallas, were discovered in the same decade, and hundreds of thousands have now been catalogued. Only a few are over 150 km (100 miles) in diameter, the largest – Ceres, classified since 2006 as a dwarf planet rather than an asteroid ...
Lloyd, John Uri
(1849-1936) US chemist, author of Etidorhpa, or The End of Earth: The Strange History of a Mysterious Being and the Account of a Remarkable Journey (1895; rev vt 1901) [for full subtitles, which differ, see Checklist], a metaphysical Fantastic Voyage in which the narrator – whose manuscript has been discovered by Lloyd – is led by a blind humanoid named I-Am-The-Man to a Lost World in the ...
Young, Florence Ethel
(1875-1945) UK author mostly of romances from the turn of the century to about 1936; of sf interest is The War of the Sexes (1905), set in a distant Near Future as envisioned in a dream where the Invention in the twentieth century of a fertility drug for rabbits has caused the virtual elimination of the human male; women breed by parthenogenesis. [JC]
Phantom Creeps, The
US Serial Film (1939). Universal Pictures. Directed by Ford Beebe and Saul A. Goodkind. Written by Basil Dickey and George Plympton, based on a story by Wyllis Cooper. Cast includes Dorothy Arnold, Robert Kent, Bela Lugosi, Jack C. Smith, Edwin Stanley Regis Toomey and Ed Wolff. Twelve circa 21-minute instalments. Black and white. / "Mad Scientist" Dr. Alex Zorka (Lugosi) ...
Incredibles, The
Animated film (2004). Disney/Pixar Animation Studios. Written and directed by Brad Bird. 120 minutes. Cast includes Maeve Andrews, Bird, Spencer Fox, Eli Fucile, Holly Hunter, Samuel L Jackson, Jason Lee, Craig T Nelson and Sarah Vowell. Colour. / Superhero Bob Parr (Nelson), known as Mr Incredible, is forced into early retirement – along with his colleagues – by lawsuits over the collateral damage of his crime-fighting heroics. Fifteen ...
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 ...