SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 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
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Time Travel
It is a great literary convenience to be able to move a narrative viewpoint backwards or forwards in Time, and writers have always been prepared to use whatever narrative devices come to hand for this purpose. Until the end of the nineteenth century, dreams were the favoured method – perhaps most significantly deployed in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and Edgar Allan ...
Watts, Peter
(1958- ) Canadian marine biologist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Niche" in Tesseracts3 (anth 1990) edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott; his early short fiction was assembled as Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes (coll 2001); Beyond the Rift (coll 2013) mostly assembles more recent stories. He is very much better known, however, for his longer work, in ...
Irving, Theo
(? -? ) UK author of whom nothing is known; his sf novel, Half Way to Hades (1901), whose plot – as reported by George Locke in A Spectrum of Fantasy: Volume Two (1994) – involves X-ray vision and Telepathy. [JC]
Communications
Many aspects of communication in sf are dealt with under separate entries in this volume. The most familiar form of communication is through language, for a discussion of which see Linguistics (also Universal Translator). Devices allowing communication at a distance, besides those discussed in the next paragraph, include the Videophone. For the perennially popular theme of opening ...
Thiaudière, Edmond
(1837-1930) French philosopher and author, active from before 1860, most of his work being nonfiction. His sf includes La Dernière Bataille: épopée prophétique de l'année 1909 ["The Last Battle: Prophetic Epic of the Year 1909"] (1873 chap) as by Frederic Stampf, a Future War tale climaxing in the creation of a unified socialist Europe; and the three speculations about experimental ...
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 ...