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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.
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Samalman, Alexander
(1904-1956) US author and editor who, after many years with Standard Magazines, became in 1954 editor of their sf journals, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fantastic Story Magazine (see Fantastic Story Quarterly) and Startling Stories, the first two of which were soon amalgamated with the latter, though to little avail, for it folded before the end of 1955. Relatively little of ...
Winner, J B B
Group pseudonym of Jeff Winner (? - ), Brittany Winner (? - ) and Brianna Winner (? - ), Brittany and Brianna being identical twins, whose father Jeff may have been the primary author of the Strand sequence beginning with The Strand Prophecy (2006), a Young Adult series in which a Superhero ...
Imaginative Tales
US Digest-size magazine, a bimonthly companion to Imagination, published by William Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing, which ran for 26 issues from September 1954-November 1958. The last three issues, July-November 1958, were published under the title Space Travel (but continued the previous numeration) in a doomed effort to capture the post-Sputnik space-enthusiast market. It was edited by ...
Rinkoff, Barbara Jean
(1923-1975) US author of books for children, of which Elbert, the Mind Reader (1967) has, as its title indicates, some sf interest. [JC]
Simenon, Georges
(1903-1989) Belgian-born author, in France 1925-1945 and 1955-1957, famous in his enormously prolific career mainly for the seventy-five or so Maigret novels about a Paris-based police superintendent, but also for what he called romans durs: 100 or more savagely intense studies of class-ridden men – women hardly feature as protagonists in his work – who have been driven to and beyond their psychological limits, and who break. Of these novels, ...
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 ...