SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 7 October 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 6 October 2026
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Knobel, Philip
(1929-1982) US author known only for Mr Moon (1979), a tale of First Contact in which an Alien visits Earth. [JC]
Cohen, Jack
(1933-2019) UK reproductive biologist, formerly with the University of Warwick, and author of several nonfiction books in which the relationship between speculative fiction and the speculative sciences are explored, all written in collaboration with Ian Stewart. The first of these is The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (1994). Of particular sf interest is the their exploration of possible ...
Ad Astra [film]
Film (2019). New Regency Pictures, Bona Film Group, Keep Your Head. Directed by James Gray. Written by Gray and Ethen Gross. Cast includes Loren Dean, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Brad Pitt, Donald Sutherland, Liv Tyler. 123 minutes. Colour. / Several decades into an undated Near Future, the US Space Command sends po-faced Major Roy McBride (Pitt) to Mars on an urgent mission to attempt to communicate at long-distance with his ...
Futurians
An sf group active 1938-1945, significantly located in New York, then and arguably still the publishing centre for American sf. The group was notable for radical politics and the conviction that sf fans should be forward-looking and constructive; the name came from J Michael Rosenblum's UK fanzine, The Futurian. Though deeply involved in Fanzine publishing ...
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 ...