SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 July 2025
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 14 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Muir, John Kenneth
(1969- ) US author, almost exclusively of nonfiction studies and encyclopedias, with an emphasis on Television, beginning with his first book, Exploring Space 1999: An Episode Guide and Complete History of the Mid-1970s Science Fiction Television Series (1997). Other titles of interest include An Annotated Guide to Television's Battlestar Galactica (1999); A Critical History of Doctor Who on Television ...
Gladden, Washington
(1836-1918) US clergyman noted for his progressive views on such issues as union rights and racial segregration; of his many books, mostly on religious topics, Santa Claus on a Lark and Other Christmas Stories (coll 1890) contains seasonal fantasies, and The Cosmopolis City Club (January-?March 1893 Century Magazine; 1893), in which a Utopia is created through fruitful gatherings of a wide range of concerned citizens of the ...
Marshall, Peyton
(1972- ) US author active since the early 2000s, her short work being exclusively nonfantastic. Her first novel, Goodhouse (2014), though its plot adheres to the dominant Near Future Young Adult Dystopia model, is written with a fluent literary intensity that lifts it from some of the constraints implied by its literal obedience to genre conventions. The young ...
Linklater, Eric
(1899-1974) Scottish author and playwright, in active service (underage) during World War One, an experience which, he stated twenty years after its close, transformed him from a "patriot" into a thinking man. He was proficient in various genres though he is best remembered for his novels, beginning with White Maa's Saga (1929), the best-known of these being Juan in America (1931), a picaresque Satire on ...
Sympson, Revd Joseph
(1715-1807) UK minister – Vicar of Wythburn – and author, a friend of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), whose son, Joseph Sympson (? -? ) was also a poet. The elder Sympson's book-length poem, Science Revived; Or, the Vision of Alfred: A Poem in Eight Books (1802), though essentially a fantasy of history, has some Proto SF interest when the spirit of Alfred the Great is transported to another ...
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 ...