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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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Dickens, Charles
(1812-1870) UK editor and author, almost certainly the greatest novelist in the English language. Dickens wrote considerable fantasy, including most famously A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1843) which, though not exactly a Club Story, is notable for an implied frame narrator who seems to be telling us the tale aloud, as though he were incanting a mini-saga [for Christmas Books see The ...
Spruill, Steven G
(1946- ) US psychologist and author, who has also written as by Steven Harriman and Steve Lyon. In his first sf novel, Keepers of the Gate (1977; rev 1978), a complicated adventure tale rather in the mode of Keith Laumer, the alien Proteps of Eridani turn out to be an advanced form of Homo sapiens, and have been suppressing mankind's urge to the stars for selfish reasons; the generic cues for revelling in such a ...
Household, Geoffrey
(1900-1988) UK author whose life abroad between about 1920 and 1945 was exceedingly catch-as-catch-can, though he left the army after World War Two as a Lieutenant-Colonel. He remains best known for Rogue Male (1939), filmed as Man Hunt (1941) directed by Fritz Lang, a dark and solitudinous updating of the thrillers of John Buchan, whose protagonist misses a chance to assassinate Hitler (unnamed in the ...
Franklin, Edgar
Working name used for his publications by US author Edgar Franklin Stearns (1879-1958), son of Frank Albert Stearns, who wrote as Fred Thorpe; his Mr Hawkins' Humorous Adventures (coll of linked stories 1904), all reprinted from The Argosy, features the eponymous inventor/Scientist comically failing to make a series of devices, such as the pumpless pump, work properly – a ...
Cohen, Jack
(1933-2019) UK reproductive biologist, formerly with the University of Warwick, and author of several nonfiction books in which the relationship between speculative fiction and the speculative sciences are explored, all written in collaboration with Ian Stewart. The first of these is The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (1994). Of particular sf interest is the their exploration of possible ...
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 ...