SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 17 March 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 16 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Dietz, William C
(1945-2026) US author who began to publish sf with War World (1986; vt Galactic Bounty 1997), the first volume of his Sam McCade sequence of sf adventures about an interstellar bounty hunter, which continued with Imperial Bounty (1988) and two further titles. The galactic venue of the series exhibits some interesting kinks, and McCade himself gradually gains individuality. Although the angle of approach differs – the protagonist this time ...
Magic
In the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928) "magic" is defined as "the pretended art of influencing the course of events ... by processes supposed to owe their efficacy to their power of compelling the intervention of spiritual beings, or of bringing into operation some occult controlling principle of nature". The lexicographer assumed that there is no difficulty in telling a "pretended" art from a real one, nor in distinguishing the "occult" from the ...
Wilson, Robert Anton
(1932-2007) US author who remains best known for the first Illuminatus! sequence – The Eye in the Pyramid (1975), The Golden Apple (1975) and Leviathan (1975), assembled as The Illuminatus Trilogy (omni 1984) – all written with Robert J Shea. Shea did not collaborate with Wilson on Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), The Illuminati Papers ...
Lewis, Oscar
(1893-1992) US editor and author active from 1912 as an author of magazine stories for boys. His Alternate-History novel, The Lost Years: A Biographical Fantasy (1951), depicts through the recorded reactions of contemporaries the last years of Abraham Lincoln in a world where he was never assassinated. / Lewis should not to be confused with the anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1914-1970), author of The Children of Sanchez (1961). ...
Shulman, Dee
(1957- ) South African author and illustrator, in the UK from childhood, whose first book, Hetty the Yeti (2004 chap), was written for younger children. She is of some sf interest for the Young Adult Parallon Trilogy comprising Fever (2012), Delirium (2013) and Afterlife (2014), an updating of the Timeslip romance in which a laboratory experiment ...
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 ...