SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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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Newitz, Annalee
(1969- ) US journalist and author, most of whose work has been nonfiction, beginning with White Trash: Race and Class in America (1997) with Matt Wray; some of their titles, like Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013), engage in Futures Studies exercises. Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006) is a relatively early attempt ...
Captain Midnight
1. Serial Film (1942). Columbia Pictures. Directed by James W Horne. Written by Basil Dickey, Wyndham Gittens, George Plympton and Jack Stanley, based on the radio serial Captain Midnight (1938-1949) created and written by Wilfred G Moore and Robert M Burtt. 15 episodes; total running time 270 minutes. Cast includes James Craven, Sam Edwards, Knox Manning (narrator), Dave O'Brien and Luana Walters. Black and white. / Highly ...
Steam Engine Time
Australian Fanzine, edited and published by Bruce Gillespie (Melbourne, Australia); co-edited with Maureen Kincaid Speller and Paul Kincaid (Folkestone, England) for issues #1-#3; thereafter with Janine G Stinson (Michigan, USA). A4 photo-offset. Average length 50pp. Thirteen issues 2000-2012. / Steam Engine Time ...
Cryogenics
From a Greek root meaning "cold-producing", this word is used in Physics to mean the production of extremely low temperatures and the study of phenomena at those temperatures. The shorter word Cryonics was more commonly used in sf Terminology when – as is usual – it is people or other living organic materials that are frozen. This short version has since been adopted for real-world freezing of ...
Cast, P C
(1960- ) US author, almost exclusively of Young Adult fantasy, much of it with her daughter Kristin Cast in the House of Night sequence beginning with Marked (2007), set in an Alternate History version of America inhabited by both homo sapiens and "vampyres" (see Vampires); she also collaborated on a sequel series, ...
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 ...