SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 6 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Arkham Sampler, The
US "little" magazine, review size (9 x 6 in; about 230 x 150 mm), quarterly, eight issues, Winter 1948 to Autumn 1949, published by Arkham House, edited by August Derleth. An offshoot of Arkham House's book-publishing activities, Arkham Sampler was as much a literary review as a fantasy magazine, incorporating both essays and reviews as well as fiction, a small amount of which was reprinted from obscure sources. Amongst ...
Evans, Linda
(1958-2023) US author whose first novel Sleipnir (1994) is a fantasy in which a modern GI intervenes in the world of Norse Gods and Mythology as Ragnarok looms. With Robert Asprin, Evans co-wrote the Time Scout sequence of Time Travel adventures beginning with Time Scout (1995), in which accidentally formed ...
Garis, Howard R
(1873-1962) US author active from about 1896, known mainly for such work outside the sf field as his Uncle Wiggily series, which began in 1910 in the Newark Evening News, and ran to nearly 15,000 widely syndicated episodes, some of which were gathered into the seventy-nine published volumes in the series; the newspaper column, in various late incarnations, only stopped in the year of his death. Much of the work he wrote for Edward ...
Matter Transmission
The matter transmitter is one of sf's many facilitating devices for Transportation: a hypothetical machine which is not rationally plausible in terms of known science (at least at any macroscopic scale) but which is very convenient for certain narrative purposes (see Imaginary Science). By virtue of an obvious play on words, matter transmitters were sometimes called "transmats" – as in Lan ...
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 ...