SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 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 7 July 2025
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Avengers: Age of Ultron
Film (2015). Marvel Studios in association with Paramount Pictures. Written and directed by Joss Whedon. Story by Zac Penn and Whedon, based on the Marvel Comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Cast includes Paul Bettany, Don Cheadle, Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Clark Gregg, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Kretschmann, ...
Venus
Because Earth's inner neighbour presented a bright and featureless face to early astronomers, it became something of a mystery planet. Nineteenth-century astronomers and early-twentieth-century sf writers generally imagined that, as the featureless face was a permanent cloud layer, the surface beneath must be warm and wet; the Venus of the imagination became a planet of vast oceans (perhaps with no land at all) or sweltering jungles. In the 1960s, however, probes revealed that Venus has no ...
Adem
The name under which Turkish-UK musician Adem Ilhan (?early 1980s- ) releases his music. Adem's most evidently sf album is Love and Other Planets (2006); a gently pleasant if perhaps underpowered set of folk-electronic musings on cosmic love and outer space, articulating the belief that "we are not alone". Adem's website describes the album, a little vaguely, as being "about space. And cosmic things. And people." Adem also plays ...
Science Fiction Oral History Association
A non-profit US corporation (SFOHA for short) founded in 1975 with the aim of preserving aspects of sf history in audio-recorded form. The SFOHA's remit is to tape and archive Interviews and other oral material (including Convention speeches) relevant to the history and working of sf as both subculture and literature; against the studied disinclination of Fandom to perform this ongoing task with any ...
Lory, Robert
(1936-2020) US public relations adviser and author, who began publishing sf with "Rundown" for Worlds of If (see If) in May 1963; his stories were assembled as A Harvest of Hoodwinks (coll 1970 dos). His sf novels, mostly light, fantasy-laced adventures, are unambitious but competent; they include Identity Seven (1974), which involves Identity Exchange in various realities, and ...
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 ...