SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Fenix
["Phoenix"] Polish monthly Print Magazine of Fantastika launched in 1990 and active until 2001. It aspired to a monthly schedule, but the full set of 12 issues in a year was achieved only twice, in 1996 and 2000; other years saw closer to ten or so issues. In total, 107 issues appeared, beginning with Volume 0 and ending with volume 7/8 (107). / Fenix was an initiative of several Polish ...
Penrice, Arthur
Pseudonym of UK author George Theodosius Boughton Kyngdon (1821-1916). The narrator of Skyward and Earthward (1875), whose name is Arthur Penrice, travels to the Moon in an advanced Balloon, where he discovers a race of Telepaths living in caves; Penrice then travels to Mars, also inhabited. The second half of the tale is set tamely back on Earth. [JC]
LeFanu, Sarah
(1953- ) Scottish academic long in England whose Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (anth 1985), edited with Jen Green (1954- ), provided a forum for Women SF Writers. The Feminism illustrated in that book could serve readers as a backdrop for In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988; vt ...
Cyborgs
The term "cyborg" is a contraction of "cybernetic organism" and refers to the product of human/machine hybridization. It was coined by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline in their article "Cyborgs in Space" (September 1960 Astronautics p26), which proposed "Altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments". Early sf uses of the term appear in the Comic Space Man (1962) and Frank ...
North, Rick
A House Name used for the Young Astronauts Shared-World sf series created for the Young Astronaut Council. Margaret Wander Bonanno, S N Lewitt and John Peel are all contributors to this sequence. [DRL]
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 ...