SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 July 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 7 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Grossman, Austin
(1969- ) US author and Videogame designer whose debut sf novel is the Comics-based Parody Soon I Will Be Invincible (2007), told in alternating sections from the viewpoints of Mad Scientist Supervillain Dr Impossible and a Cyborg superheroine. The lively narrative, set in an ...
Frank, Waldo
(1889-1967) US author whose wide-ranging but at times not very penetrating interest in philosophy, Religion and Psychology gained him acclaim in the 1920s, though his left-leaning politics became less and less palatable as the decades passed. Chalk Face (1924) details the effects of a psychological investigation into split personalities, climaxing in the protagonist's discovery that he has detached an aspect of his own ...
Bradley, Andre L
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the Young-Adult Trailer Park Prince (2024), translates twenty-first-century human Gender issues into a quasi-allegorical drama: two Alien princes, cast onto Earth by the explosion of their planet, end up in a trailer camp, where they must deal with racism and sexism (see Race in SF; ...
eFanzines.com
Online Fanzine resource founded in December 2000 by UK-born fan Bill Burns (1947- ), long resident in the US, who continues to maintain the website. Though including much historical material, eFanzines.com leans towards archiving contemporary fanzines as they appear, now typically as PDF originals rather than the scans from paper format preferred by the site's chief "rival" The ...
Kamishibai
["Paper Theatre"] Although there has been a scroll-based story-telling tradition in Japan since the 12th century, for our purposes the kamishibai medium was a spin-off that flourished between the 1920s and the 1950s, spanning the Depression era, the peak of Japanese Imperialism, and the American postwar Occupation. / A kamishibai was a frame mounted on the back of a bicycle, coincidentally equivalent in dimensions to 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 ...