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Saturday 11 April 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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Adaf, Shimon
(1972- ) Israeli editor, musician, poet and author; born to Moroccan immigrant parents, he grew up in Sderot, a poor town situated some five kilometres from Gaza City and populated by mostly Moroccan Jewish immigrants. His childhood experience shapes much of his fiction. / Adaf has won several awards for his Poetry, which is widely translated. He moved to Tel Aviv after his military service, where he became the ...
Sykes, W Stanley
(1894-1961) UK anaesthesiologist and author, in active service during World War One. Most of his fiction comprises detective thrillers with no fantastic content; of sf interest is The Ray of Doom: A Detective Novel (1935), in which the eponymous Ray is presented with some scientific rigour. [JC]
Cox, A B
(1893-1971) UK author, in active service during World War One; best known for detective stories as by Anthony Berkeley and as by Francis Iles. He also wrote some fantasies and at least two sf works: The Professor on Paws (1926), in which a man's brain is transplanted into the family Cat (see Identity Transfer), but – in an odd prefiguration of Daniel ...
Advent: Publishers
Chicago-based specialist publishing house, founded in 1956 by Earl Kemp and other sf fan members of the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club. The focus of Advent:Publishers was on critical and bibliographical material, together with works relating to Fandom. Its first book was Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder (coll 1956; exp 1967; exp 1996). Other notable critical ...
Wells, Catherine
Working name of US author Catherine Jean Wells Dimenstein (1952- ) who began publishing sf with the tightly-woven Coconino sequence – comprising The Earth Is All That Lasts (1991), Children of the Earth (1992) and The Earth Saver (1993) – set aeons hence in a Ruined Earth devastated by Climate Change and other ...
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 ...