SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Waters, Steve
(1965- ) UK academic and playwright, whose works have been staged since the late 1990s. Of sf interest is The Contingency Plan: On the Beach & Resilience (coll of linked plays 2009); both plays, which were first performed in 2009 in London, are set in a Near Future Britain suffering the consequences of Climate Change, with an emphasis on inundation – Bristol is already underwater. ...
Womack, James
(1979- ) UK editor, translator and poet, married to Marian Womack, notable as a team for The Best of Spanish Steampunk (anth 2015 ebook) with Marian Womack (see Steampunk). His translations include work by Dmitri Bilenkin, Sergio del Molino, Sever Gansovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Silvina ...
Slam Bang Comics
US Comic (1940). Fawcett Publications Inc. 7 issues. Artists include Jack Binder, Gus Ricca, Hal Sharp and Mike Suchorsky. Scriptwriters include Jack Cole, Mort Weisinger and apparently Manly Wade Wellman (see below). 68 pages, with seven long strips and a short text story each issue; plus short gag, fiction or non-fiction pieces as filler. The strips feature a ...
Krenkel, Roy G
(1918-1983) American illustrator. A lifelong resident of New York, Krenkel studied at the School of Visual Arts run by Burne Hogarth (1911-1996) after World War Two and started his career at EC Comics, where he became friends with Frank Frazetta. A great deal of his art, heavily influenced by the work of J Allen St John and also by the Australian artist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), was published ...
France
The history of France's relationship with sf is one of long flirtation, marked through the centuries by episodic outbursts of passion and, in recent times, by an increasing shift from authorship to readership, from the active to the passive role, as more and more people become avid consumers of the US/UK sf tradition. A few remarkable French writers of sf have emerged, but, although the 1970s were an active period for French sf, no truly indigenous school of writing has yet taken shape. / A ...
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 ...