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Wednesday 16 September 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 14 September 2026
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Adventures of Dr Fu Manchu, The
US tv series (1956). Studio City Television Productions/Republic Productions, Inc. Directors included Franklin Andreon and William Witney. Writers included Richard H Landau, John K Butler, Ronald Davidson, Barry Shipman. Based on characters created by Sax Rohmer. Cast includes Carla Balenda, John George, Glen Gordon, Clark Howat, Laurette Luez and Lester Matthews. 13 30-minute episodes. Black and white. / Sir Dennis Nayland Smith (Matthews) and his ...
Coulton, Jonathan
(1970- ) US singer-songwriter, whose prolific early work in 2005-2006 was particularly notable for its use of sf tropes in wistfully comic first-person songs about geek masculinity, especially in the EP Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow (2005). In "Better" the singer's girlfriend is slowly turning into a Cyborg; in "The Future Soon" a teenager fantasizes about a career as a robotically augmented ...
Miller, Jimmy
Working name of US author born Jane Curley (? - ), married to Warren Miller from 1958 until his death. The Big Win (1969) is a noisy but sometimes effective Post-Holocaust quest story which moves eventually into space, as the protagonists search for the Chinese war criminal who caused the manufactured Pandemic that has decimated the rest of ...
Klerykal Fiction
Polish term for a subgenre of Polish Fantastika dealing with Religion. It is often associated with works of fiction (mostly sf) critical of religion; however, there are dissenting views. The term entered Polish sf critical discourse by the mid-1990s, and has been attributed to Tomasz Kołodziejczak, although the general phenomenon of a new wave of Polish works ...
Lambourne, John
Working name of UK author John Battersby Crompton Lamburn (1893-1972), brother of the author of the Just William children's books, Richmal Crompton (1890-1969). Lambourne's Professor Ellis Lost Race tales – The Kingdom that Was (1931) and its sequel The Second Leopard (1932) – en passant describe in mildly allegorical, subduedly humorous terms how 50,000 years ago (see ...
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 ...