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Sunday 19 July 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.
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Lister, Thomas Henry
(1800-1842) UK civil servant and author, whose first novel, Granby (1826), was the first fully-fledged example of the nonfantastic Silver Fork genre later popularized by Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer Lytton and others. A Silver Fork ambience permeates his one work of sf interest, "A Dialogue for the Year 2130: Extracted from the Album of a Modern Sibyl" in The Keepsake for MDCCCXXX (anth ...
Oulipo
A term standing for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which might be translated as "workshop of potential literature". Oulipo is an extremely selfconscious international literary movement founded in 1960 by the French authors Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais (1901-1984). Over the years Oulipo's members and proponents have included many internationally known fabulists and magic realists such as Harry ...
Williams, F Chenhalls
(1880-1965) UK minister, inventor (he patented an improved sash window catch) and author of several novels, two of which are sf. The Inner Number (1927) features a thought-reading Machine (see Psionics) which generates a romantic melodrama; in The Potter's Wheel (1931) as F C Williams, a Mad Scientist dies horribly after attempting to kill his daughter with his ...
Redfinn, Michael
(? - ) US author of Being (1988), an sf novel in which UFOs are proved to exist, justifying general Paranoia, as there has been a conspiracy to conceal them. [JC]
Haiblum, Isidore
(1935-2012) US author, born, educated and based in New York, where he set much of his fiction. Haiblum's best work can best be described as Judeofuturism, a term for which he must be considered an obvious early influence in the same sense as, say, Samuel R Delany's influence on Cyberpunk. The bulk of Haiblum's work combines a tongue-in-cheek hardboiled narrative with a distinctly Yiddish Humour ...
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 ...