SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 July 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 14 July 2025
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Fantasy Magazine
1. A variant title (December 1933 to January 1937) of the celebrated Fanzine or Amateur Magazine (which see) Science Fiction Digest, founded 1932, of which Julius Schwartz was one of the editors. This in turn had incorporated The Time Traveller, often regarded as the first true fanzine (January 1932 #1), which Schwartz had published ...
Sarnia
Pseudonym of New Zealand-born author Alice Dew-Smith (1859-1949), in the UK from the 1870s; she is of some sf interest for A White Umbrella and Other Stories (coll 1895); in the third story, "A Ballet in the Skies", the narrator is taken to the Moon by "flowers". [JC]
Booth, Naomi
(? - ) UK academic and author whose first work of fiction, The Lost Art of Sinking (2015), which is nonfantastic, dramatizes her interest as a critical analysis of literary swooning. In her first novel, Sealed (2017), a Near Future acceleration of Climate Change in Australia is further intensified through the effects of a deadly ...
Mesnay, Henry
(? - ) French author of La Redoutable secret (1948; trans anon as The Formidable Secret 1952), a Lost World tale set in the mountains of Asia, where the manuscript of a survivor of the fall of Atlantis is discovered far Underground. [JC]
Prediction
This entry deals with sf as a "predictive" genre. For sf stories about foretelling future events, see Precognition. / The most widespread false belief about sf among the general public is that it is a literature of prediction. Very few sf writers have ever claimed this to be the case, although Hugo Gernsback did see one function of his sf magazines as to paint an accurate picture of the future. Very few of the stories he ...
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 ...