SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 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
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Strauss, Erwin S
(1948- ) US bibliographer active in Fandom, perhaps best known for a Fanzine published by him in various formats and titles since 1968, from 1979 to date as The Connection; as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Science Fiction Society, he compiled The Blackdex / The Bluedex (1965) with Marilyn Joyce Wisowaty, the basis for ...
Page, Spider
Pseudonym of US author Donald Graham Cormack (1909-2002), active in the Pulp magazines beginning with his first recorded sale "Revolt of the Circus Freaks" (October/November 1938 Horror Stories); his Blue Steel #1: The Ultimate Answer to Evil (1979) had originally been written as "Slaughter, Inc" in 1943 to continue the Spider sequence (see Norvell W Page) in Spider, but was not printed then due to ...
Throssell, Ric
Working name of Australian diplomat, actor, playwright and author Richard Prichard Throssell (1922-1999), who during much of his career suffered from Cold War suspicions and Paranoia, a McCarthy-like persecution caused almost entirely by his remaining in contact with his leftwing family; his mother, the author Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969), was a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia. Of sf interest is a ...
Lang, King
A House Name used by Curtis Warren on a number of sf novels: five by David Griffiths and one each by George Hay, Brian Holloway, John William Jennison and E C Tubb. See Checklist below. [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 ...