SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 10 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.
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Dunsany, Lord
Working name of Irish playwright, poet, journalist and author Edward Plunkett (1878-1957), made Baron Dunsany on the death of his father in 1899, with almost all his work, from its beginnings in the 1890s, signed Lord Dunsany; in active service during World War One. Though primarily a writer of Fantasy, he is of sf interest through the widespread influence of his language and imagery, and through the spoof sf explanations and ...
Disintegrator
In sf Terminology, one of the commonest of hand-held Weapons (see Rays), especially in Space Opera of the 1930s and 1940s. The device may have been a product of squeamishness – or perhaps just neatness – since it creates a maximum of destruction with a minimum of bleeding pieces left to sweep up afterwards. The term seems to have been introduced by Nictzin ...
Wallace, Edgar
(1875-1932) UK playwright, editor and author, father of Bryan Edgar Wallace; he is best known for his many thrillers, though he was also variously active as an sf writer from the beginning of his active career: the Just Men thriller sequence features occasional sf or Technothriller elements, such as a vast revolutionary movement's use of an Airship to bomb ...
Rimmer, Robert H
(1917-2001) US author who became famous with the Harrad sequence beginning with the nonfantastic The Harrad Experiment (1966), notable for its impassioned advocacy of Sex seen as almost always beneficial and liberating, regardless of the sexual orientation and number of partners involved; he also advocated less restrictive definitions of marriage, causing some of his readers in the sf field to associate his advocacies with those articulated by Robert ...
Bloom, Harold
(1930-2019) US academic and author, active from the mid-1950s, author of one novel, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (1979), whose subtitle is accurate. As a critic, he is best known for his analysis of the relationship between strong male authors and their predecessors over the last several centuries of Western literature, an analysis deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, an influence he freely admitted made him anxious. ...
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 ...