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Tuesday 11 November 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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Sabin, Edwin L
(1870-1952) US author and historian best known for his heavily researched boys' adventure novels. He began as a journalist with a penchant for poetry and his early fiction is light-hearted, almost presaging P G Wodehouse in its eccentricity. The Magic Mashie and Other Golfish Stories (coll 1902) is a volume of humorous golfing stories a few of which verge on the fantastic, such as "The Supersensitive Golf-Ball" about a golf-ball that reacts to ...
Frezza, Robert
(1956- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Max Weber's War" for Amazing, January 1987. The Small Colonial War sequence – comprising A Small Colonial War (1990), Fire in a Faraway Place (1994) and Cain's Land (1996) – replays the Boer War on a colony planet dominated by a Japanese-run interstellar empire, though without Kaffirs. The Imperial Japanese military forces, predictably, ...
Sargasso Sea
This region in the west of the North Atlantic Ocean, with Bermuda near its western edge, is named for the Sargassum seaweed that grows there and which – along with historical accounts of sailing ships being becalmed there – gave rise to the popular legend of a seaweed-choked Zone of mystery, a mist-shrouded oceanic Lost World of derelict ocean craft, very probably infested with Monsters and ...
Wyatt, Rachel
(1929- ) UK-born dramatist and author, in Canada from 1957; of some sf interest is her first novel, The String Box (1970), set in a surrealized but seemingly Near Future City (see Absurdist SF) whose inhabitants follow maddening sets of rules to survive; possession of the eponymous box counts enormously. [JC]
Schweblin, Samanta
(1978- ) Argentinian author active from around 2000, in Germany from 2012; her work typically expresses, along with exilic tensions, an occasionally sweet-tongued toughness in the presentation of self, sometimes in nonfantastic stories where touches of Ray Bradbury's ambient sense of the horrific can be detected. But more often the abysses of the world are depicted with a deadpan clarity reminiscent of the work of Franz ...
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 ...