SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 July 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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
eFanzines.com
Online Fanzine resource founded in December 2000 by UK-born fan Bill Burns (1947- ), long resident in the US, who continues to maintain the website. Though including much historical material, eFanzines.com leans towards archiving contemporary fanzines as they appear, now typically as PDF originals rather than the scans from paper format preferred by the site's chief "rival" The ...
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
Influential Graphic Novel by writer-artist Frank Miller, starring an aged, cynical and disillusioned Batman, who begrudgingly returns from a ten-year retirement amidst a Near-Future Dystopia that has overrun his beloved Gotham City with gang violence. Published in four volumes in 1986 by DC Comics and ...
Kerman, Judith
(1945- ) US translator, publisher, academic, anthologist and poet (see Poetry), active from the 1970s; academic work is usually signed Judith B Kerman. Her poetry might be described as generally comprising personalized takes on tropes of the fantastic, with the teller of the poem, usually presented in a moderately fantasticated first person, governing the outcome. Her anthology Uncommonplaces: Poems of the Fantastic (anth 2000) ...
Tuglas, Friedebert
(1886-1971) Estonian author, born Friedebert Mihkelson, a name he abandoned in 1923 in favour of what had been his pseudonym; active from the early twentieth century, often in exile; in favour with Estonia's Communist rulers until after World War Two, becoming an internal exile around 1950, though his civil rights were restored in 1955; in 1985, the Friedebert Tuglas Museum was opened in Tallinn. Relatively little of his work has ...
Mittié, Jean-Corisandre
(? -? ) French author of Descente en Angleterre ["The Raid on England"] (1798), a very early example of the Future-War Invasion tale, here conceived in dramatic form, apparently farcical; any close resemblance to the much later Battle of Dorking mode is unestablished. [JC]
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 ...