SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
House Names
Floating Pseudonyms invented by a publishing company and regularly made available to or imposed upon its authors. They were usually created to protect a literary or intellectual property owned by the publisher and to which various writers contributed. One of the earliest was "Noname" employed by the publisher Frank Tousey on the Frank Reade and Frank Reade, Jr series of dime novels. The use of house names became ...
Lady in the Water
Film (2006). Warner Bros. Pictures in association with Legendary Pictures presents a Blinding Edge Pictures Production. Written and directed by M Night Shyamalan. Cast includes Bob Balaban, Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Freddy Rodriguez and Jeffrey Wright. 100 minutes. Colour. / The manager of an apartment complex is encumbered with a nymphlike being from a water Dimension, who is pursued by monstrous ...
Sinyavsky, Andrey
(1925-1997) Russian dissident author and literary critic who published the manuscripts he smuggled into the West in the late 1950s and early 1960s under the name Abram Tertz. His identity became known when the Soviet authorities arrested him in 1966 and subjected him, along with his friend and fellow dissident Yuli Daniel (who wrote as Nikolai Arzhak), to a show trial; both were imprisoned; after his release, Sinyavsky was permitted to emigrate to France in 1973, ...
Biro, Val
Working name of Hungarian-born illustrator and author Balint Stephen Biro (1921-2014), in the UK from 1939 until his death. During his prolific career as a book illustrator, which began in the early 1940s – his woodcut illustrations for Paul Tabori's Private Gallery (coll 1944) are already extremely accomplished – he executed a number of covers for sf and fantasy books, though never in a style that demonstrated any deep affinity for the ...
Electric Spec
US low-paying Online Magazine published by Lesley Smith of Boulder, Colorado, initially with the editorial assistance of David Hughes, Renata Hill and Georgia Simonds but now edited by Betsy Dornbusch and David Hughes. Originally published three times a year, the magazine began in Spring 2006 and went quarterly from Spring 2010. The first four volumes, until Winter 2009, were downloadable in pdf format, but issues are now only accessible at the website. ...
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 ...