SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 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.
Site updated on 9 February 2026
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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 ...
Simone, Nina
Working name of US singer, pianist, composer and civil rights activist Eunice Kathleen Waymon (1933-2003), widely celebrated as a writer and performer in jazz and R&B. Her one excursion into sf, "22nd Century", was recorded in 1971 but only made available in the box set The Complete RCA Album Collection (2011). It is a remarkable, near ten-minute, stream-of-consciousness depiction of a Near Future after a bloody revolution in 1988 and plague in ...
Furney, Elliott E
(1848-1914) US medical doctor (based in St Louis, Missouri), inventor and author, whose Culture, a Modern Method (1891) applies techniques that might a century later be described as Genetic Engineering with Lamarckian implications, with the Invention of a process by which unhealthy cellular material is recast and rejuvenated; further experiments, where animals are – perhaps surgically – modified into ...
Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?
US animated tv series (1994-1999). DIC Enterprises. Directed by Joe Barruso, Stan Phillips and Michael Maliani. Writers include Perry Adleman, Doug Molitor, Sean Roche and Melanie Williams. Voice cast includes Rodger Bumpass, Jennifer Hale, Scott Menville and Rita Moreno. 40 21-minute episodes. Colour. / The first of two animated series based on the computer game Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (1985) and its ...
Labyrinths
Labyrinths and mazes have a long history, and distinctions between them have long been blurred. The archetypal maze was a two-dimensional pattern, often cut in turf, to be traversed voluntarily as a kind of ritual Game. Even traditional hedge-mazes like Hampton Court's in London do not offer serious physical barriers; thus the narrator of Alasdair Gray's Five Letters from an Eastern Empire (1979 ...
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 ...