SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 11 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Skinkle, Dorothy
(1927-1979) US author of an sf novel, Star Giant (1969), in which an Alien exiled to Earth must – like his earlier fellows who impersonated Hercules and Abraham Lincoln and others – make use of his excessive height and superior intellect to defend the planet. [JC]
MacMillan, Armour
(1882-1939) UK author of a Timeslip tale, The Incredible Adventure (1928), uneasily Equipoisal in its depiction of the experiences of a modern banker who awakens in the Greece of 30 BCE able to speak the language; pretending he is from Atlantis, he creates considerable stir through his descriptions of various Inventions, including the motorcar. His ...
Griffiths, John
(1934- ) UK author in whose sf novel, The Survivors (1965), an assorted group of folk hang on in a Cornish cave after China starts World War Three. A nonfiction (and significantly unliterary) study, Three Tomorrows: American, British and Soviet Science Fiction (1980), treats the genre as a forum, defined – according to the sociological principles of Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), author of ...
Cohen, Jack
(1933-2019) UK reproductive biologist, formerly with the University of Warwick, and author of several nonfiction books in which the relationship between speculative fiction and the speculative sciences are explored, all written in collaboration with Ian Stewart. The first of these is The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (1994). Of particular sf interest is the their exploration of possible ...
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 ...