SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 September 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.
Site updated on 7 September 2026
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Ash, Alan
(1909-1988) UK author in whose sf adventure, Conditioned for Space (1955), a sleeper, having been encased in a block of ice for a century, awakens (see Sleeper Awakes) to find himself – after scientists transform him into a kind of Cyborg – in the front line of Earth defence in a space war. [JC]
Widnall, Samuel Page
(1827-1894) UK publisher and author, owner of The Old Vicarage at Grantchester from 1850, adding a Folly, and an artificial island in the River Cam which still exists; it was briefly and famously the home of Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), and later on of Jeffrey Archer. From the Vicarage, Widnall published several books from 1871, including A Mystery of Sixty Centuries; Or, a Modern St George and the Dragon (1889), which depicts the discover of a ...
Teilhet, Darwin L
(1904-1964) US screenwriter and author, who also wrote as by Cyrus T Fisher; his suspense thrillers normally stop short of the fantastic, though The Fear Makers (1945), filmed as The Fearmakers (1958) to his own script, describes a very Near Future conspiracy to betray America. The mystery embedded in the nature of the returning soldier protagonist's dead partner edges into the fantastic; the film is entirely mundane. [JC]
Miller, Marc
(1947- ) US Game designer, inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in 1981. Miller was an important figure in the early development of the US Role Playing Game and Wargame industries, both as a founder of Game Designers' Workshop – one of the earliest companies enthusiastic about creating science-fictional games – and as the designer ...
Erikson, Andrew
(? - ) UK editor whose two Anthologies, The Classic Science Fiction Collection (anth 2018) and Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Stories (anth 2018), provide a range of tales, mostly from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The latter volume, through an espousal of H G Wells and Robert E Howard as figures of cognate ...
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 ...