SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 July 2025
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 14 July 2025
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Young Einstein
Film (1988). Serious Productions. Produced and directed by Yahoo Serious. Written by Serious and David Roach. Cast includes John Howard, Odile Le Clezio and Serious. 91 minutes. Colour. / In an Alternate History 1905, Albert Einstein (Serious), a young Tasmanian apple farmer, discovers that E = mc2 (see Nuclear Energy), splits the beer atom, meets and is loved by Marie Curie (Le Clezio), has his ...
Harvey, M Elayn
(1945- ) US author whose sf novel, Warhaven (1987), the first volume of an incomplete Young Adult trilogy, puts its young protagonist through a series of trials, at the end of which he has clearly prepared himself to become one of the Guardians who covertly supervise a variety of spacefaring races (see Cultural Engineering; Secret Masters; ...
Time
"Time," a character explains in Ray Cummings's The Girl in the Golden Atom (stories 5 March 1919, 24 January-24 February 1920 All-Story Weekly; fixup 1921), "is what keeps everything from happening at once." This enormously broad sf theme is dealt with under several encyclopedia headwords, of which the most important is Time Travel. Physical travel through time is ...
Atkinson, Kate
(1951- ) UK author, long resident in Scotland, whose novels have consistently engaged in postmodern plays with fictionality, though not in her early work with any sustained intent at undermining the non-fantastic modes she has occupied, which include the family history and the crime novel. The Jackson Brodie books, featuring a retired detective, very nearly however demolish the claim to realism through their witty recourse to cascades of coincidence (for Lateral ...
White, Caroline Earle
(1833-1916) US philanthropist, anti-vivisectionist and author; she was not involved in the women's suffrage movement, but has been considered of Feminist interests for her wide range of activities. She is of some sf interest for Love in the Tropics: A Romance of the South Seas (1890), which is set in an unknown Island in the Pacific (see Lost Worlds), where the shipwrecked protagonist ...
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 ...