SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 13 May 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 12 May 2025
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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Arkham Sampler, The
US "little" magazine, review size (9 x 6 in; about 230 x 150 mm), quarterly, eight issues, Winter 1948 to Autumn 1949, published by Arkham House, edited by August Derleth. An offshoot of Arkham House's book-publishing activities, Arkham Sampler was as much a literary review as a fantasy magazine, incorporating both essays and reviews as well as fiction, a small amount of which was reprinted from obscure sources. Amongst ...
Rao Zhonghua
(1933-2010) Chinese author and editor at the Shanghai Science and Technology Publishing House, in which capacity he edited journals on metallurgy and, the million-selling Kexue Huabao ["Science Pictorial"] from 1972-1986. A great popularizer of science, in the mode of a Chinese Isaac Asimov, he also wrote many book reviews that helped to push and define the sf genre in China. He played a key role in the flowering of Chinese sf ...
O'Brien, Tim
(1946- ) US author best known for anguished accounts of the Vietnam War, including the novel Going After Cacciato (1978); of sf interest is The Nuclear Age (1985), set in a Near Future America in 1995 anxiety-ridden by anticipations of nuclear war. The protagonist, an ex-paramilitary radical now middle-aged, goes to ground, where he digs a useless bomb shelter against the coming ...
Le Prêtre, William
Pseudonym of UK chaplain, tutor and lecturer the Rev William Hendy Cock (1873-1938), author of the Near Future sf novel, The Bolshevik (1931), in which the Bolsheviks have created a Dystopian rule over France and Britain; an uprising ensues. [JC]
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 ...