SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 10 June 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 8 June 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Waterloo, Stanley
(1846-1913) US editor, journalist and author who began to publish short fiction in the late 1860s; his first sf novel, The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man (1897; vt A Tale of the Time of the Cave Men: Being the Story of Ab 1904), is a juvenile culture-hero protagonists makes the Inventions required and acquires the necessary culture – along with strict monogamy on Eugenical lines made ...
Berkey, John
(1932-2008) US illustrator, occasionally working as just Berkey, probably best remembered for his sf and space-science Illustration but who also worked in a wide variety of other genres, including the images for no fewer than 16 US postage stamps, among them the Santa Claus stamps for 1983 and 1991; he also painted the Old Elvis Stamp, the image that lost a nationwide poll in 1992 to choose between this and the Young Elvis Stamp (painted by Mark Stutzman). / ...
Brockway, Fenner
(1888-1988) UK author long active in socialist politics, long respected for his humane personality. He was imprisoned for his opposition to World War One; served as a member of the British Parliament 1929-1931 and 1950-1964; and was made a life peer in 1964. In his Scientific Romance, Purple Plague: A Tale of Love and Revolution (1935), a liner is quarantined at sea for a decade because of a mysterious ...
Day, Vox
(1968- ) Pseudonym of US computer Game designer and fantasy author Theodore Beale, co-founder of the video game company Fenris Wolf which developed the Rebel Moon game. As Beale he has written the Eternal Warriors sequence of fundamentalist-Christian fantasy novels; his sf contribution, as Day, is the game Tie Rebel Moon (1996) with Bruce Bethke. The game ...
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 ...