SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 12 August 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 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: Kees van Toorn and LAcon V
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Colvin, Ian
(1912-1975) UK author and journalist whose sf novel is Domesday Village (1948), a Utopia set in a semi-agrarian Near-Future UK with a socialist regime. [JC]
Cogswell, Theodore R
(1918-1987) US author and academic, who claimed to have been a teenaged ambulance driver on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He began publishing sf in June 1952 with what proved to be one of his most successful stories, "The Specter General" for Astounding. In this long, amusing tale – much in the vein Keith Laumer was later to make his own – a long-forgotten maintenance division of the Galactic Protectorate ...
DC Comics
US Comic-book publishing company, based in New York, owing much of its commercial success to its ownership of the copyrights in the Superheroes Batman, who it has been argued is not perhaps quite an sf figure, and Superman, who undoubtedly is. / In February 1935 Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson published the first US ...
Legge, J G
(1861-1940) Hong Kong-born author, in UK from an early age; his sf Satire, The Millennium (1927), mocks attempts to reform a Near Future Britain. [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 ...