SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 January 2025
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.
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Nathenson, Joseph
(1925-2006) US author of Deep, Very Deep Space (1978), in which a complex Starship heads towards the end of the universe. [JC]
Defenders of the Earth
US animated tv series (1986-1991). Marvel Productions/King Features Entertainment for the Fox Television Network. Created by Gerry Conway, Ross Andru and John Romita Sr. Produced by John Ahern, Bill Hutten, Tony Love, Don Sheppard, others. Directors included John Gibbs, Ray Lee, and Will Meugniot. Writers included Chris Bunch, Arthur Byron Cover, Mark Edward Edens, Mel ...
Future Histories
The grouping of generally independent-seeming sf stories into an overarching "History of the Future" is a device most famously used by Robert A Heinlein, who caught the imagination of 1940s Fandom with a timeline featuring colourful labels like "The Crazy Years" – summarized by a sequence of mildly bizarre "1969" newspaper headlines in Methuselah's Children (July-September 1941 Astounding; rev ...
Xu Zhuodai
Pen-name of Xu Fulin (1880-circa 1958), who flourished as a humorist during the 1920s in the cosmopolitan Chinese city of Shanghai, gaining the sobriquet Huaji Dafu ["The Master of Laughter"]. Among his other professions, he ran a school for acrobats, was a sometime playwright and translator, dabbled in the nascent film business, and even set up a soy sauce factory. / Among his many works of film reviews, essays and short stories, Yingxixue ...
Sweterlitsch, Tom
(? - ) US author who also signs his name Thomas Sweterlitsch; he began to publish work of genre interest with "The Disposable Man" in Something Wicked SF and Horror Magazine for February 2012, a Satire on post 9/11 American Politics. Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2015) is set mostly in a Virtual Reality Keep embedded in 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 (1966-1967), and later in ...