SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 10 August 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 3 August 2026
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Bergonzi, Bernard
(1929-2016) UK literary academic, critic and poet, latterly Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Warwick, who began to publish essays of genre interest with "The Publication of The Time Machine, 1894-1895" (February 1960 Review of English Studies) and "The Time Machine: An Ironic Myth" (December 1960 Critical Quarterly). His many nonfiction works include a useful examination of the sf or Scientific Romances of H G ...
Wonder, William
Pseudonym of US author Thomas Kirwan (1829-1911), whose Utopia, Reciprocity (Social and Economic) in the Thirtieth Century; The Coming Cooperative Age: A Forecast of the World's Future (1909), casts its twentieth-century protagonist, via an unexplained form of Time Travel, a millennium hence, where New York presides benignly over a mostly rural land, with good-humoured socialist precepts ...
British Fantasy Society Bulletin
Fanzine published by the first British Fantasy Society. Edited by D R Smith. 28 issues from June 1942 to November 1946, on a schedule generally varying between monthly and bimonthly. / This was the Newszine of the first British Fantasy Society, formed in 1942 and continuing to 1946. Following three issues of the tentatively titled ...
Alternate Worlds
An alternate world – some writers and commentators prefer the designation "alternative world" on grammatical grounds – is an account of Earth as it might have become in consequence of some hypothetical alteration in history. Many sf stories use Parallel Worlds as a frame in which multiple alternate worlds can coexist, sometimes interacting with one another. Previous editions of this encyclopedia discussed ...
Horseman, Elaine
(1924-1999) UK author of the Hubble sequence of novels for children; they are predominantly fantasy, though The Hubbles and The Robot (1968) plays lightly with Robots and with other sf subjects. [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 ...