SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 17 January 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 13 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Ableman, Paul
(1927-2006) UK author and playwright who remains best-known for his first, non-fantastic novel, I Hear Voices (1958), though his first work of sf interest – "The Prophet Mackenbee" for Lucifer in 1952, about an sf author who surrounds himself with disciples in an absurd world – came earlier. The Twilight of the Vilp (1969) is not so much sf proper as an informed and sophisticated playing with the conventions of the genre in a ...
Ramo, Simon
(1913-2016) US engineer and author whose nonfiction includes Peacetime Uses of Outer Space (1961) and What's Wrong with Our Technological Society and How to Fix It (1983), in which he advocates nuclear disarmament and a society capable of controlling its own excesses. A similar philosophy is given Near Future fictional form in ...
Pereval
Russia animated film (1988; vt The Pass; vt The Path). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Vladimir Tarasov. Written by Kir Bulychev based on his excerpted novella "Pereval" ["The Pass"] (July-November 1980 Znanie-Sila) whose full text was published as Poselok (1988; trans John H Costello as Those Who Survive 2000). Voice cast includes Aleksandr ...
Seibel, George
(1872-1958) US journalist, poet and author, of sf interest for The Fall: Being a True Account of What Happened in Paradise, for the Benefit of All Scandal-Mongers, with a New Interpretation of Sacred History, Vindicating Snakes and Apples (1919 chap), an allegorized exercise in Prehistoric SF involving an advanced civilization of Homo sapiens which moves en masse to Venus, leaving behind one recalcitrant couple ...
Wood, Walter
(1866-1961) UK editor and author, usually on military matters. In his Future War novel, The Enemy in Our Midst: The Story of a Raid on Britain (1906), fifth columnists assist Germany in its Invasion of England, during the course of which London is invested. Wood is now best known as editor of Toilers of the Deep: The Magazine of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fisherman from 1913 ...
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 ...