SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 9 February 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 February 2023
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
Gibbons, Gavin
(1922-1978) UK publisher and author of both nonfiction and fiction; of the latter, By Space Ship to the Moon: A Tale of Adventure in Outer Space for Boys (1958), a Young Adult tale whose modestly familiar contents are hinted at in the full title. Other titles with a sound of sf – like The Coming of the Space Ships (1956) or They Rode in Space Ships (1957) – are in fact UFO books, and ...
Phelon, W P
(1834-1904) UK-born author, in the US from early manhood, who focused on occult themes, most of his fiction being Occult Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] and not listed here; Three Sevens: A Story of Ancient Initiations (1889) with Mira M Phelon is an occult treatise in fictional form. Of some sf interest is Our Story of Atlantis: Written Down for the Hermetic Brotherhood (1903), ...
Green Slime, The
Film (1968; vt Gamma 3: Cosmic War). MGM/Toei. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Written by Tom Rowe and Charles Sinclair, based on a story by Bill Finger and Ivan Reiner. Cast includes Robert Dunham, Ted Gunther, Robert Horton, Richard Jaeckel, Luciana Paluzzi, Bud Widom and David Yorston. 90 minutes. Colour. / When an Asteroid is detected on a collision course with Earth, with only hours left to prevent a catastrophe, the retiring head of space ...
McCormack, Mike
(1965- ) UK-born author, in Ireland from childhood, active from the mid 1990s. Some short stories stretch past the mundane, but very little of his work extends into the fantastic until Notes from a Coma (2005). It is a Near Future Dystopian excursus on the nature of Crime and Punishment whose protagonist, locked into a coma as an involuntary participant ...
Stratemeyer, Edward
(1862-1930) US dime-novel entrepreneur (see Dime-Novel SF), a mass producer of boys' books who reportedly wrote 160 solo works, beginning with "Walter Drumm's Heroism" (1889 Young American), along with Dime Novels for Street and Smith as by Horatio Alger (1832-1899) after his death, Jim Bowie and Nick Carter; until coming to some kind of rest – it becomes hard to work out what he ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...