SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 14 June 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 8 June 2026
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Kensett, Percy F
(1868-1940) UK author of The Amulet of Tarv: A Romance of the South Downs, 1,000 BC (1925), a Prehistoric SF tale whose present-day protagonists are given access via Time Viewer to the era in question; they are then able to establish Communications with the past. [JC]
Gove, Philip Babcock
(1902-1972) US academic, noted in later life for his editorship of the Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), which was heavily attacked for its "permissive" retreat from the prescriptive authority of its predecessors; less controversially, he is of sf interest for The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of its Criticism and a Guide for its Study, with an Annotated Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800 (1941). Though in no sense ...
Appel, Allen
(1945- ) US photographer and author whose Alex Balfour Time-Travel sequence – whose first four titles are Time after Time (1985), Twice Upon a Time (1988), Till the End of Time (1990) and In Time of War (2003) – hovers, as do so many tales of this sort, between sf and fantasy. The protagonist's visits (first to the Russian Revolution; then to the time of Mark ...
Norminton, Gregory
(1976- ) UK anthologist and author whose first novel, The Ship of Fools (2002), places an exorbitantly various and marginally fantasticated examples of Homo sapiens taken fairly directly from "The Ship of Fools" (before 1500) by Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450-1516) (see Ship of Fools), where they disport dismayedly. Arts and Wonders (2004) exploits another medieval/renaissance topos, the ...
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 ...