SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 8 August 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 3 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Piper, H Beam
(1904-1964) US author and gun collector, employed as a security man on the Pennsylvania Railroad until made redundant in the mid-1950s. Though he wrote for other genres, he is best remembered for his sf, much of which appeared in Astounding from 1947, when he began with "Time and Time Again" (April 1947 Astounding). Though he shared John W Campbell Jr's views on various fields of interest, including ...
House Names
Floating Pseudonyms invented by a publishing company and regularly made available to or imposed upon its authors. They were usually created to protect a literary or intellectual property owned by the publisher and to which various writers contributed. One of the earliest was "Noname" employed by the publisher Frank Tousey on the Frank Reade and Frank Reade, Jr series of dime novels. The use of house names became ...
Hervey, Michael
(1915-1979) UK author who moved to Australia in 1951; born Mark Hockman but known as Mark Hoffman until he changed his name by deed poll to Michael Hervey in 1942. He is the author of an estimated 3500 short stories in various genres. His sf work is minor; it includes a Utopia, Strange Hunger (1946), in which the Federated States must defend themselves against evil Slavonia, and The Silver Death (?1945 chap), about a German ...
Intrigue, The
US silent film (1916). Pallas Pictures. Directed by Frank Lloyd. Written by Julia Crawford Ivers. Cast includes Cecil Van Auker, Howard Davies, Herbert Standing, Lenore Ulrich and Florence Vidor. 64 minutes. Black and white. / We are informed that "Guy Longstreet, a young American Scientist, has almost perfected his wireless X-ray apparatus, which is expected to kill, with mathematical precision, at a distance of 25 miles" (see ...
Shadow, The
This crime-fighting character made his debut in 1930 as narrator of the US Radio programme Detective Story. The opening lines soon became famous: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" In 1937 the very popular programme became The Shadow and continued through well over 600 episodes until 1954, with Orson Welles in the star role 1937-1938; among its many scriptwriters were Alfred ...
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 ...