SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 16 October 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 12 October 2026
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Comfort, Alex
(1920-2000) UK medical doctor, poet and author of significant popular work in the fields of sexology and gerontology, being perhaps best known for The Joy of Sex (1972; frequently revised), many of whose interior illustrations were by Chris Foss. Before World War Two he established an extremely precocious reputation for his poetry and fiction, and for the pacifism he espoused rigorously during the years of conflict (later, in 1961, in connection ...
Speller, Jane
(? -? ) US author, in collaboration with her husband Robert Speller, of Adam's First Wife (1929), which recounts the experiences over 7,000 years of Lilith, originally of Sumerian birth and therefore descended from survivors of Atlantis; her Immortality is Drug-induced, but does not require the blood of virgins, and she is perhaps too level-headed to stand as ...
Kincaid, Paul
(1952- ) UK critic, award administrator and author; partner of Maureen Kincaid Speller from 1986 until her death in 2022 (they married in 1993). After an early sale to New Writings in SF which remains unpublished because the series ended, his first short story, "The Second Coming" appeared in a semi-professional magazine, Orbis, in 1984. His first fully professional publication was ...
DC Extended Universe
Initially known by viewers and critics as the DC Cinematic Universe, in order to point out obvious similarities between the competing DC and Marvel Shared World imperiums, the DC Extended Universe provides a simpler narrative of origins and story-bibles than does the much larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, which was first promulgated in 2008. But Marvel Comics and its ...
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 ...