SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2026
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Van der Poel, W I
(1909-1987) Working name of American artist Washington Irving Van der Poel Jr, who sometimes included the "Jr" in his name. While there is not an abundance of biographical information about this artist, Van der Poel is known to have been working for Macfadden Publications at the time of his US Army draft in 1942; according to an obituary he also worked for the magazines Fortune and Time. He was the art director for H L Gold's ...
Winston, Joan
(1931-2008) US author and fan also known in Fandom as Joanie Wilson, an organizer in the early 1970s of the first four Conventions devoted to Star Trek (1966-1969). She wrote about this work in Star Trek Lives! (1975) with Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Sondra Marshak and went on to publish a solo book on the ...
General Semantics
A quasi-philosophical movement founded in Chicago in 1938 by Count Alfred Korzybski, whose Science and Sanity (1933) was the basic handbook of the movement. General Semantics had a surprising success, peaking in the 1940s and 1950s. It teaches that first unsanity and later insanity are caused by adherence to an Aristotelian worldview, by which is meant the use of the two-valued either-or logic which Korzybski saw as being built into ...
Barlow, James
(1921-1973) UK author, known mainly for such work outside the sf field as Term of Trial (1961). His sf novel proper, One Half of the World (1957), presents a UK ruled by a totalitarian leftist regime; the protagonist, finding God again (and love), conflicts with the powers-that-be, unsuccessfully. The right-wing approach of this book (see Politics) is typical of British Dystopian fiction in the 1950s. ...
Dudley, Roy C
(1922-2011) US printing technician and author of Galactic Gambit (1971), an unremarkable Space Opera. [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 ...