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Saturday 14 March 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.
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West, Jessamyn
(1902-1984) US author active from the 1930s, most famous for the tales of rural Quakerism assembled in The Friendly Persuasion (coll of linked stories 1945). She is of sf interest for two novellas. "The Pismire Plan" (in Cross Section 1948: A Collection of New American Writing, anth 1948, edited by Edwin Seaver [1900-1987]) is a spoofish but ultimately serious Satire set in a Near Future ...
Hart, John
(? - ) UK author of Jizz (1992), a lightly Satirical sf speculative spoof set in Brighton, Sussex, in the twenty-first century. [JC]
Grass, Günter
(1927-2015) German artist, illustrator, sculptor and author, a significant creative and cultural voice in the long self-examination that the German world underwent (for cause) after World War Two; from the publication of his first novel, Die Blechtrommel (1959; trans Ralph Manheim as The Tin Drum 1962), he remained central to that interrogation, sometimes through the enraged and enraging mythopoesis of ...
Kerr, Geoffrey
Pseudonym of UK actor, screenwriter and author Geoffrey Kemble Grinham Keen (1895-1971), son of the actor-manager Frederick Kerr (1858-1933); he saw active service in World War One. His writing for Cinema includes the scenario for the successful supernatural comedy-romance The Ghost Goes West (1935) directed by René Clair, in which a Scottish castle is dismantled and reassembled in Florida, accompanied by its ...
Asteroids [game]
Videogame (1979). Atari. Designed by Lyle Rains, Ed Logg. Platforms: Arcade, Others. / Asteroids is a two-dimensional arcade game (see Videogames) in which the player must shoot and ultimately demolish pieces of space debris before their Spaceship is destroyed by a collision with the increasingly many fragments – the smaller, the more rapidly moving. The design was derived from a ...
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 ...