SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 22 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Carter, P Youngman
(1904-1969) UK artist, editor, illustrator and author, active from the early 1920s, early work including a cover for Blackkerchief Dick (1923) by Margery Allingham; they were married from 1927 until her death, after which he completed her final (nonfantastic) novel in the Albert Campion detective series and wrote two more as Youngman Carter. The first of these, Mr Campion's Farthing (1969), based on an outline by ...
Sandoz, Maurice
(1892-1958) Swiss author and composer who earned a PhD in chemistry but devoted himself to the arts. His fiction often included elements of Horror and sometimes bordered on the fantastic and surreal (see Fantastika). Of primary interest is his novel The Maze (1945), evidently based on the legend of a monstrous heir of Scotland's Bowes-Lyon family kept hidden in a secret room in Glamis Castle. The novel, set in the ...
Hernaman-Johnson, Francis
(1879-1949) UK physician and medical researcher and author of a Scientific Romance, The Polyphemes: A Story of Strange Adventures Among Strange Beings (1906). The beings, Polyphemus horridus, giant intelligent Moon-worshipping ants from a Pacific Island, just fail to conquer the Near Future world of 1912, despite their use of "X Magnetism" to power ...
MacPherson, Donald
Pseudonym of UK psychologist George Humphrey (1889-1966) – who held various academic posts in Canada and the USA 1916-1947 and later became professor of psychology at Oxford – for two sf novels influenced by Freudian Psychology. Go Home, Unicorn (1935) is a Scientific Romance set in Montreal, in which the life of a research Scientist – loved by two women, one ...
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 ...