SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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
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Baum, L Frank
(1856-1919) US entrepreneur, journalist, playwright and author who also published as Floyd Akers, Laura Bancroft, John Estes Cooke, Hugh Fitzgerald, Suzanne Metcalf, Schuyler Staunton and Edith Van Dyne (see below); active from around 1880. He remains most famous for his long series of tales set in the land of Oz, beginning with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900; vt The New Wizard of Oz 1903), which served as the main source for the most famous film version, ...
Reid, Ava
(1996- ) US author, initially of fantasy for Young Adult readers, some of this work ambitious and taxing (she has been compared to authors like Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link). She is perhaps best known for A Study in Drowning (2020), set in a past-raddled academy or Keep in Wales with mythopoeisis afoot. Reid is of sf interest for ...
Ashley, Mike
Working name of UK editor and researcher Michael Raymond Donald Ashley (1948- ), who has a special expertise in the history of magazine sf, fantasy and weird fiction; for this large body of significant work, he was given the Pilgrim Award for 2002. Ashley's first major work as an anthology editor was the four-volume The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, whose components are ...
Dail, C C
(1851-1902) US lawyer, poet and author whose Willmoth sequence, beginning with Willmoth the Wanderer, Or The Man from Saturn (1890; rev vt Willmoth the Wanderer 1891), is a genuine oddity. Though told with no great skill, its narrative, purporting to be that of Willmoth the Saturnian as told towards the end of his several-million-year lifespan, is an eventful affair. Willmoth proceeds from Saturn to Venus (via Antigravity) and, ...
Fearn, John Russell
(1908-1960) UK author; extremely prolific, he used many pseudonyms. During the 1930s he wrote for magazines, including the US Pulp magazines, but during World War Two he switched to books. He became a central figure in the post-war paperback boom, writing numerous Westerns, crime stories and romances as well as his sf, most of which appeared under the names Vargo Statten and Volsted Gridban (the latter ...
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 ...