SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 7 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 6 October 2026
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Nolan, William F
(1928-2021) US author and editor who trained and for a time practised as a commercial artist; he also raced cars, publishing several books on the subject. Nolan first became active in sf Fandom in the 1950s, cofounding the San Diego Science Fantasy Society, being a staff member for the Fanzine Rhodomagnetic Digest, publishing The Ray Bradbury Review (including his own first story "The Immortal Ones: A Satire" in 1952), and ...
Balchin, Nigel
(1908-1970) UK author, industrialist and wartime scientific adviser to the Army Council; married (1933-1951) to Elisabeth Ayrton. From the beginning of World War Two his fictions specialized in the creation of psychologically and physically crippled "competent men", as in The Small Back Room (1943), and were plotted around scientific problems at the verge of sf; A Sort of Traitors (1949), in particular, nears new territory as its ...
Horton, Rich
(1959- ) US software engineer working in the aerospace industry; columnist, reviewer and editor from the late 1990s, when he contributed reviews of short fiction to Tangent Online. In February 2002 he began a monthly review column in Locus – "Locus Looks at Short Fiction" – also specializing in stories gleaned from magazines and anthologies. In 2022 he announced that, after 20 years, this column would be retired; but that he ...
Infinity Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine. 20 issues November 1955 to November 1958, published by Royal Publications, edited by Larry T Shaw; irregular, with four months between some issues, one month between others. Infinity Science Fiction was one of the most interesting of the flood of new sf magazines in the early and mid-1950s. Its first issue featured Arthur C Clarke's ...
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 ...