SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 15 February 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 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Franklin, K D
Probable pseudonym of UK chemist, teacher and author A A Haslam (1929- ); his only sf publication, The Worlds of Sector P (1979), is a Space Opera whose protagonist, in his quest for a lost Spaceship and its crew, lands upon a planet where a range of AIs have manifested themselves in various forms, some of them in Robot bodies. [JC]
Mason, Colin
(1926-2020) New Zealand-born Australian journalist, politician – Senator for New South Wales 1977-1987 – and author whose Near Future sf novel, Hostage (23 July-3 August 1973 Melbourne Sun; 1973), sets the beginning of World War Three in Israel and its climax in Australia. The 2030 Spike: Countdown to Global Catastrophe (2003; rev vt ...
Dewdney, A K
(1941- ) Canadian mathematician and computer scientist whose sf novel, The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World (1984), intriguingly updates Edwin A Abbott's Flatland (1884); its Flatland protagonist, Yndrd, attempts to penetrate from his world of Arde into an epiphanous "reality beyond reality", making contact as he does with a roundworld ...
Moshfegh, Ottessa
(1981- ) US author, active from around 2005, most of her work being nonfantastic. The tortured passages of living as experienced by the protagonists in the tales assembled as Homesick for Another World (coll 2017 ebook) are viewed with a "Martian" eye that conveys a sense of the surreal extremity of the human condition. In her second novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), a young woman responds to the trauma of the modern world by ...
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 ...