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Sunday 12 April 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 6 April 2026
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Jack Gaughan Award
In full, the Jack Gaughan Award for Best Emerging Artist. Named in honour of artist Jack Gaughan and often referred to simply as the Gaughan Award, this is presented annually by NESFA, the New England Science Fiction Association, to an artist who has achieved professional status within the past five years. The winner is selected by a panel of judges. In practice, the qualification "within the past five years" seems to be applied fairly elastically; Richard ...
McElhiney, Gaile Churchill
(1888-1978) US author of a Lost Race novel, Into the Dawn (1945), in which a pilot discovers a hidden Island in the South Pacific housing descendants of lost Lemuria who have here created, with the aid of advances in Technology, a spiritually elevated Utopia. [JC]
Avon Fantasy Reader
US Digest-size magazine published by Avon Books, edited by Donald A Wollheim, who considered it an anthology series [see his entry, therefore, for list of titles] although it resembled a magazine, as did a number of Avon's other publications at the time when the Pulps, pocketbooks and digests were all vying for position on the newsstands. Magazine bibliographers consider it a magazine; book ...
Grant, Rob
(1955-2026) UK author and scriptwriter who with Doug Naylor who worked for three years as head writers for Spitting Image (1984-1996), a satirical Television series using a combination of puppets and live action, and who together wrote the Red Dwarf (1988-current) [which see for discussion] television series, which weds black Humour and ...
Baker, Nicholson
(1957- ) US author whose novels have consistently threatened to push mimetic conventions past the point where they can usefully be applied, beginning with The Mezzanine (1988), whose enormously expanded rendering of a small movement in time and space clearly stretches "realism" into something more interesting. U and I: A True Story (1991) self-revealingly anatomizes John Updike. The protagonist of ...
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 ...