SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 17 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 12 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 ...
Jerrold, Douglas [2]
(1803-1857) UK playwright, columnist, magazine proprietor and editor much involved throughout his life in the London literary scene; great-grandfather of Douglas Jerrold (1893-1964). A regular contributor to Punch, often pseudonymously, from the second issue of the magazine in 1841 until his death. At his funeral in 1857 Charles Dickens was one of the pall-bearers. Little of his work is within ...
Shinjō Kazuma
(? - ) Japanese author whose early success came in 1991 with a Tie to a Play-by-Mail game: Hōrai Gakuen ["Penglai Academy"] set at a huge, 100,000-strong school of duellists and schemers, itself on an offshore island that takes its name from that of the "isles of the immortals" in Chinese legend. His subsequent work has largely ...
Thor: the Dark World
Film (2013). Marvel Studios. Directed by Alan Taylor. Written by Christopher L Yost and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely; story by Don Payne and Robert Rodat. Cast includes Kat Dennings, Christopher Eccleston, Idris Elba, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Natalie Portman, René Russo and Stellan Skarsgârd. 112 minutes. Colour, 3D (converted). / Malekith the Accursed (Eccleston), lord of Svartalfheim, is defeated by the forces of Asgard and conceals ...
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 ...
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 ...