SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 18 June 2025
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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Balloons
For some six months in 1783 Paris was the Cape Canaveral of the eighteenth century as Parisians watched a succession of extraordinary ascents by hot-air balloons. The first successful manned trip took place on 21 November, as reported by Benjamin Franklin, and it started off a long series of speculations about the conquest of the air, almost certainly the first fictional response being The Aerostatic Spy: Or, Excursions with an Air Balloon by an Aerial Traveller (1785; exp vt ...
Pluto [tv]
Japanese animated tv series (2023). Studio M2. Based on the Manga by Naoki Urasawa, itself based on Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy story The Greatest Robot on Earth (June 1964-January 1965, Shonen magazine, original title "Chikyū saidai no robotto"). Directed by Toshio Kawaguchi. Written by Heisuke Yamashita and Tatsurou ...
Kehuan Shijie
[Literally "SF World", although the publisher's preferred translation is "Science Fiction World"] The journal of record of the modern sf community in China, Kehuan Shijie was founded in 1979 in Chengdu, Sichuan, as the State-supported Kexue Wenyi ["Science Literature and Art"], one of several magazines that sprang up amid a post-Mao renewal of interest in science popularization. However, with a sudden reversal in the Party line on sf, and claims that the ...
Paul, Frank R
(1884-1963) American artist, born in Austria. He studied art in Vienna and Paris before moving to London to obtain additional training in architecture, which later became one of his professions, as he designed several buildings in New York City while also earning money by illustrating textbooks. After emigrating to New York in 1906, Paul initially drew political cartoons for a newspaper before meeting fellow immigrant Hugo Gernsback, who hired him to do ...
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 ...