SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 5 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 5 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Gale, Zona
(1874-1938) US journalist and author, an early feminist whose Romance Island (1906), the first of her many books, is a Lost Race tale set on an Island called Yaque somewhere "in the eastern sea" – its inhabitants have displaced it partially into the fourth Dimension – where the father of the protagonist's beloved, after being shipwrecked near it, has been proclaimed king ...
Betancourt, John Gregory
(1963- ) US editor and author who became involved in Small-Press publishing in his teens, beginning to publish short fiction with "Vernon's Dragon" in 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories (anth 1984) edited by Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr and Martin H Greenberg; an earlier sale was the poem "The Argia" ...
Things to Come
Film (1936). London Films. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Written by Lajos Biro, H G Wells, based on Wells's The Shape of Things to Come (1933). Cast includes Maurice Braddell, Edward Chapman, Cedric Hardwicke, Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott and Ann Todd. 130 minutes, cut to 113 minutes. Black and white. / This Alexander Korda production was the most expensive and ambitious sf film of the 1930s – and, despite ...
Gay, Anne
(1952- ) UK teacher and author, married to Stan Nicholls (1949- ), who began publishing sf with "Wishbone" in Gollancz-Sunday Times Best SF Stories (anth 1987) edited anonymously; she has used her married name Anne Nicholls for later short fiction. Her first novel, Mindsail (1990) – like all her works it is a Planetary Romance – promisingly describes an alien planet to ...
Satire
From the earliest days of Proto SF, satire was its prevailing mode, and this inheritance was evident even after sf proper began in the nineteenth century. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines satire as literary work "in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule". Proto sf is seldom interested in imagining the societies of other worlds or future times for their own sake; most proto sf of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (by, ...
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 ...