SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 February 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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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Bechdolt, Jack
Working name of US author John Ernest Bechdolt (1884-1954) for his fiction, though he used his full name for other writing. The Lost Vikings (1931) features juveniles who discover a Lost Race of Vikings in Alaska. The Torch (24 January-21 February 1920 Argosy Weekly; 1948) is a Ruined Earth tale, set in a devastated New York a thousand ...
Collections
With sf/fantasy long a subject for academic study, especially in the USA, many major institutional collections have been built up, a process which has supplemented but in no sense supplanted the large number of private collections amassed by fans and scholars. From the first, Genre SF has tended to be published in formats significantly (and foolishly) slighted in the accession policies of every category of institutional library – from university libraries to ...
Ellison, Harlan
(1934-2018) US author, the most controversial and among the finest of those writers associated with sf whose careers began in the 1950s. For many years he insisted that he was not in fact primarily an sf writer, and indeed most of his large oeuvre is better described as nonfantastic, or Fantasy, or Horror; but his influence on the field – or more accurately perhaps his example, as he became famous through writing little but ...
Scott, Rion Amilcar
(? - ) US author whose fiction has been restricted to short forms; he began to publish work of genre interest with "Numbers" in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (anth 2014) edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older. Much of his work is set in the (fictional) town of Cross River, Maryland, founded in the early nineteenth century after a successful slave revolt (see Race in SF) ...
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 ...