SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Otaku Elf
Japanese animated tv series (2023). Original title Edomae Elf. C2C. Directed by Takebumi Anzai. Written by Shōgo Yasukawa, based on the Manga by Akihiko Higuchi. Voice cast includes Ami Koshimizu and Yuka Ozaki. Twelve 24-minute episodes. Colour. / 400 years ago, Elda (Koshimizu), an Immortal elf from another Dimension, took over the role of goddess ( ...
McDonald, Steven E
(1956- ) UK author, now in the US, who began publishing sf with "Empty Barrels" in Analog for June 1978, his best-known story being "Ideologies" (October 1980 Analog), and whose first novel, The Janus Syndrome (1981), put into Space-Opera guise a tale involving racial oppression, romantic exaggerations of material, and masquerades. He then fell silent, though he has more ...
Tabula Rasa
Tabula Rasa was a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, much influenced by Third Person Shooters. In the game's back-story a Near Future Earth had been invaded by an Alien empire. The attackers were ruled by a race known as the Bane, an offshoot of a Forerunner civilization which ...
Mayhew, Julie
(? - ) UK actor, playwright and author whose first novel, the Young Adult Red Ink (2013), engages peripherally with supernatural material. Her second novel, The Big Lie (2015), is a Hitler Wins tale set in an Alternate History Britain under German rule around 2014, and conflates its protagonist's coming of age with the gradual ...
Gunn, James E
(1923-2020) US author, critic and teacher, born in Kansas City and educated at the University of Kansas, where he worked and taught – ultimately as professor of English and journalism and Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, now the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction – from 1958 to 2010, and where he remained Professor Emeritus until his death. Throughout his academic career, he published considerable sf criticism, beginning with excerpts from his MA ...
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 ...