SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 14 March 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 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Ghidalia, Vic
(1926-2013) US publicist for ABC TV who in his spare time co-edited eight genre Anthologies with Roger Elwood, from The Little Monsters (anth 1969) to Beware More Beasts (anth 1975). He was also the solo editor of several further anthologies published from 1971 to 1977, as detailed in the Checklist below. [JC/DRL]
Nature
Long-established UK generalist science magazine (1869-current), a nonfiction Slick now published weekly by Nature Publishing Group (a subsidiary of Macmillan). H G Wells contributed some speculative essays around the beginning of the twentieth century. Under the editorship of Henry Gee, Nature introduced a weekly series of short-short (see Flash Fiction) sf stories as ...
Killer Ape
Film (1953). Columbia Pictures. Produced by Sam Katzman. Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennett (credited as Spencer G Bennett). Written by Samuel Newman based on the Comics character Jungle Jim created by Alex Raymond. Cast includes Nestor Paiva, Max Palmer, Carol Thurston, Johnny Weissmuller and Burt Wenland. 68 minutes. Black and white. / In southeastern Asia, adventurer Jungle Jim notices various wild animals acting ...
Heartfield, Kate
(1977- ) Canadian journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Pair of Ragged Claws" in Black Treacle for March/April 2013. Her first novel, Armed in Her Fashion (2018) is a fantasy set in fourteenth-century northern Europe involving revenants and Shapeshifters and strong women; an earlier novella, The Course of True Love (2016 ebook), is set in a fantasy world based ...
de Vere, Howard
Pseudonym of US author William Howard Van Orden (?1816-?1894), active in the later nineteenth century as an author of tales for Boys' Papers. Three titles have been discovered to be of sf interest: The Demon of the Deep; Or, Above and Beneath the Waves (1876 The Boys of New York; 1893 chap), an Under the Sea adventure for boys with Inventions galore, including a submarine ...
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 ...