SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 10 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Briggs, Ian
(? - ) UK scriptwriter and actor who wrote two Television serials for the Doctor Who universe, each featuring the Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy: "Dragonfire" (23 November 1987 to 7 December 1987), which he novelized as Doctor Who: Dragonfire (1989); and "The Curse of Fenric" (25 October 1989 to 15 November 1989), which he novelized as Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric ...
Terry, Teri
Working name of French-born lawyer, optometrist and author Teresa Terry (? - ), mostly in Canada from infancy, in UK from 2004; the young protagonist of the Young Adult Slated sequence, comprising Slated (2012), Fractured (2013) and Shattered (2014), has suffered a Memory Edit at the hands of a tyrannical ...
Airships
In this encyclopedia the term "airship" is generally used for powered lighter-than-air craft extrapolated from dirigible Balloons and employed as Transportation. However, it seems reasonable also to mention the winged but machine-driven Consolidator featured in Daniel Defoe's The Consolidator (1705), which was soon forgotten, like all Chinese Inventions, ...
Halle, Louis J
(1910-1998) US academic and author whose Utopia, Sedge (1963), contrasts a community which isolates itself from civilization for hundreds of years with the increasingly frenetic world beyond the gates. [JC]
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 ...