SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 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: Ansible Editions
Hoobler, Thomas
(1942-2025) US editor and author, mostly of nonfiction for young audiences in collaboration with his wife, Dorothy Hoobler, with at least 100 titles beginning in the 1970s. Of sf interest is the Hunters sequence comprising The Hunters (1978) with Burt Wetanson and The Treasure Hunters (1983) with Burt Wetanson, featuring a race of ...
AD Police Files
Japanese Original Video Animation (1990). Artmic, AIC. Directed by Takamasa Ikegami and Akira Nishimori. Written by Takehito Nakazawa and Kaoru Mizutani. Voice cast includes Toshio Furukawa, Youko Matsuoka, Miina Tominaga and Norio Wakamoto. Three 27-minute episodes. Colour. / This was a spin-off from Bubblegum Crisis (1987-1991), set a few years earlier in 2027 (see Near Future). ...
Walsh, Rupert
(? -? ) UK author whose Future War tale, The Fate of the Triple Alliance: A Jeu d'Esprit (1890 chap), roughly predicts the pattern of European alliances whose clash helped launch World War One, though he was less successful in his prediction of the Weapons used, which include electric bayonets and paper armour. This may be due to the author's ...
Spain, Chy Ryan
(? - ) Canadian multi-media artist and author whose first novel, the Young Adult Metatron's Children (2022), faces its teenage cast with various dilemmas connected with their existence in a restricted Zone known as The Village, in a world radically affected by Climate Change. Various members of the cast have ...
Conapt
In sf Terminology, an apartment in a high-rise building. Conapts often feature what is effectively a complete life-support system, so that even when they are in a densely populated city their inhabitants are often seen to be isolated from other people. A conapt is often assumed to be in a city consisting of high-rise buildings, each one highly populated, but with the buildings themselves not necessarily crowded together, and sometimes separated by parkland. ...
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 ...