SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 September 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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Fraser, David
(1920-2012) UK soldier who served in World War Two and became a senior general in the UK armed forces in the postwar period; in retirement, from a Conservative position, he opposed the second war with Iraq as unjustified, and "unwise, to the point of insanity". He began publishing fiction and nonfiction around 1980, his best-known fiction being the Hardrow Chronicles, contemporary military tales in several volumes beginning with Adam Hardrow (1982). Of sf interest is ...
Ramsey, Milton Worth
(1848-1906) US author who – although he self-published his sf novels – was of some interest. In Six Thousand Years Hence (1891) a visiting planet drags the protagonist's City into space, where he and his colleagues embark upon a Fantastic Voyage to several other civilizations, including a complex advanced culture within the Sun, and return millennia hence to a tamed high-tech ...
Held, Serge
(1892-1969) Ukrainian-born French consulting engineer and author of La Mort du Fer (1931; trans Fletcher Pratt as "The Death of Iron" [September-December 1932 Wonder Stories]), a Disaster tale – a mysterious virus destroys all iron in the world – which leads to a confused collapse of civilization (see ...
Elliott, George P
(1918-1980) US academic and author, many of whose short stories were sf or fantasy, the first of genre interest being "The Hill" in Pacific for February 1948. He is best remembered for "Among the Dangs" (June 1958 Esquire), assembled in Among the Dangs: Ten Short Stories (coll 1960), which deals with an imaginary South American tribe and has been widely reprinted within and outside the genre; his essay "Discovering the Dangs", in ...
Knudtsen, Ingar, Jr
(1944-2025) One of Norway's most popular and productive sf authors, with thirty books to his credit. Since childhood he had been interested in astronomy and space exploration, and always did his best to keep the scientific details in his writing as correct as possible. His style was highly visual, with short, descriptive sentences which efficiently moved the story forward. He often wrote from a Feminist point of view, many of 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 ...