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Tuesday 10 February 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Mader, Friedrich W
(1866-1945) German author, mainly of juvenile novels, many set in German East Africa and written somewhat in the style of H Rider Haggard. Wunderwelten (1911; trans Max Shachtman as Distant Worlds: The Story of a Voyage to the Planets 1932) is a juvenile which takes its Spaceship crew to Mars and finally – one of the first sf texts to ...
Morselli, Guido
(1912-1973) Italian author of at least eight works of fiction, all of which were rejected by Italian publishers during his life. Some are of sf interest. Roma senza Papa ["Rome Without the Pope"] (written 1966-1967; 1974) is a Satire on the Catholic Church, and upon its attempts to "modernize" itself, set in 1997. Contro-passato prossimo: un'ipotesi retrospettiva (written 1969-1970; 1975; trans Hugh Shankland as ...
Paterson, Isabel
(1886-1961) Canadian journalist, literary critic and author, in the US from around 1915, whose The God of the Machine (1943) originated many of the tenets of libertarianism (see Libertarian SF) whose intellectual interactions with Ayn Rand from the 1930s on were mutually influential. Of her fiction, The Road of the Gods (1930) is a Lost Race novel set in Germany 2,000 ...
Willson, Basil Wynne
(1868-1946) UK teacher, Anglican bishop and translator, whose free and (for its time, and considering his Christian background) relatively uncensored translation of the Vera Historia of Lucian was published as Lucian's Wonderland (1899). [JC]
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 ...