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Monday 14 July 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2025
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Daniel, Gabriel
(1649-1728) French historian, polemical theologian and author whose Voiage du Monde de Descartes (1690; trans Thomas Taylor as A Voyage to the World of Cartesius 1692) is a Fantastic Voyage through the Cartesian universe, eventually carrying its protagonists beyond the Moon into outer "space" (it has been speculated that Daniel was the first to use the word in this sense). Space turns out to contain at ...
Johns, Willy
(? - ) US author known only for The Fabulous Journey of Hieronymus Meeker (1954), a Fantastic Voyage tale in which a Gulliver-like protagonist (see Gulliver; Jonathan Swift) travels in the good ship Jeemarad to a planet where he discovers a Utopia based on constant transformation. [JC]
Chamberlain, Henry Richardson
(1859-1911) US author and newspaper editor of considerable political sophistication, London correspondent for The New York Sun from 1892 until his death; he predicted (correctly) that some kind of Balkan conflict would soon ignite a world war. His acumen also shows itself in his Near Future sf novel, 6,000 Tons of Gold (1894): the protagonist – after gaining a huge hoard of gold from Patagonia – attempts to reform society by ...
Kagan, Janet
(1946-2008) US author who began publishing sf with "Faith-of-the-Month Club" (1 February 1982 Analog), as by Anon., and who won a 1993 Hugo Best Novelette Award for "The Nutcracker Coup" (December 1992 Asimov's). Her first sf book was a Star Trek Tie, Uhura's Song (1985), reckoned to be one of the better novels attached to that enterprise. Her ...
Frahm, Leanne
(1946-2025) Australian author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Passage to Earth" in Galileo for January 1980 and (published in the same month) "The Wood for the Trees" in Chrysalis 6 (anth 1980) edited by Roy Torgeson. Frahm collected further sf and fantasy stories in Borderline (coll 1996), which includes a bibliography. Her sf is perhaps less idiomatic than ...
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 ...