SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 8 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.
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Sallis, James
(1944-2026) US musician, poet and author, briefly active in New Worlds during its Michael Moorcock-directed New-Wave phase; he began to publish work of genre interest in this context with "Kazoo" (August 1967 New Worlds) and co-edited the magazine 1968-1969. His clearly acknowledged models in the French avant garde and the gnomic brevity of much of his work ...
de Girardin, Delphine
(1804-1855) French poet and author (she was born in the border-city of Aachen during the fourteen years of French rule, 1801-1815), who also wrote under her maiden name, Delphine Gay, as Mme Émile de Girardin and as by Charles de Launay. Neither Le Lorgnon ["The Eyeglasses"] as Delphine Gay (1831) nor La Canne de M de Balzac ["The Cane of Monsieur de Balzac"] (1836) as Mme Émile de Girardin, translated together by Brian ...
Ritchie, Paul
(1923-1996) Australian painter, author and playwright whose Confessions of a People Lover (1967) depicts a grey, urban, Dystopian UK where the old ("longlivers") are eliminated by the state at age 70 and the young are corrupt, cultureless vandals. The book is narrated by a surviving 80-year-old longliver in an enriched, clotted, free-associational style, and is devoid of sf instruments or speculations; it can be read as an allegory of the post- ...
Weber, T C
(? - ) US ecologist and author whose Near Future BetterWorld Trilogy sequence beginning with Sleep State Interrupt (2016) focuses on attempts to defeat the media corporation MediaCorp whose BetterWorld, an addictive Virtual Reality site, has hypnotized the planet for the benefit of a tiny number of venture capitalists and a corrupt American president. The ...
IAFA Award
Awards presented since 1985 by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA). Winners of the Distinguished Scholarship award – presented since 1986 – are listed below. Other categories, perhaps of less general interest to the science fiction community, include the William L Crawford Fantasy Award for a debut work of fantasy, the Robert A Collins Service Award for service to the IAFA and regular ...
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 ...