SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 17 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Sheng Keyi
(1973- ) Chinese author who came to writing as a mature student after late teens and twenties spent in a variety of professions. Her stories frequently dwell on the formative event of her teenage years – the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, which she observed first through the prism of state media, and only later came to appreciate as a moment of deeper resonance. / A strong thread of Feminism runs ...
Knapp, Adeline
(1860-1909) US journalist, feminist and author, partner in the 1890s of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose collection of speculative tales and disquisitions, One Thousand Dollars a Day: Studies in Practical Economics (coll 1894), contains several items of direct sf interest, including the title story, where a lode of inexhaustible wealth turns sour for the citizens of the United States; "The Discontented Machine", in which an assembly-line ...
Little Witch Academia
Japanese animated tv series (2017). Trigger. Created and Directed by Yoh Yoshinari. Written by Michiru Shimada. Voice cast includes Megumi Han, Noriko Hidaka, Yōko Hikasa, Shōzō Iizuka, Rie Murakawa, Michiyo Murase, Fumiko Orikasa and Junko Takeuchi. 25 24-minute episodes. Colour. / This Television series was preceded by two short films: Little Witch Academia (2013) and ...
Ballingrud, Nathan
(1970- ) US author, for many years exclusively of horror, much of it supernatural, almost always in the form of short stories. He began to publish work of genre interest with "Memories of Green" in Forbidden Lines for Fall 1992, with much of his work being assembled as North American Lake Monsters (coll 2013; vt Monsterland 2020) and Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell (coll 2019; exp ...
von Schlegell, Mark
(1967- ) US art critic and author whose sf System Series sequence, beginning with Venusia (2005), is set initially on a distant Near Future Dystopian Earth ravaged by Pollution and neoliberal rapacity, and moves to Venus where Genetically Engineered colonists, reduced by ...
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 ...