SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy
Founded in 1970 by Toronto Public Library in Canada, to house a major donation by sf author and anthologist Judith Merril and substantially added to since, mostly during the long successful tenure from 1986 to 2017 of Lorna Toolis as its head; known as the Spaced Out Library until 1 January 1991, and housed from September 1995 in a Special Collections building at 239 College Street in central Toronto, which also holds the ...
Griffin, Brian
(1941- ) UK author, active as a genre critic in the 1970s, who published two unremarkable sf novels for Robert Hale Limited, The Nucleation (1977) and The OMEGA Project (1978). He is better remembered for the competent Apertures: A Study of the Writings of Brian Aldiss (1984) with David Wingrove. There is no connection between him and the cartoon dog ...
Nueva Dimensión
["New Dimension"] The most important and longest-running sf magazine in Spain, published by Domingo Santos, Luis Vigil and Sebastián Martínez. Nueva Dimensión (1968-1983), popularly known as ND, published 148 regular issues, five extra issues and issued several collections of books. The schedule was initially bimonthly and changed to monthly after issue #20. It began with 168 pages that were reduced ...
Herrick, Robert
(1868-1938) US academic, diplomat and author best known for The Master of the Inn (1908), whose eponymous hero cures the mentally ill by making them work hard while contemplating the purposelessness of life as our governors and religionists would have it. His one sf novel, Sometime (1933), set mostly in Africa 1000 years hence, describes en passant the visit of some Africans to a post-ice-age North America (see ...
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 ...