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Friday 14 November 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 10 November 2025
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Glenn, Joshua
(1967- ) US editor, publisher and essayist, founder-editor of the journal Hermenaut (1992-2001), and responsible for the creation (solo or in collaboration) of several websites, including Significant Objects, Hermenaut and HiLoBrow. Through the latter site, he edited an initial iteration of the Radium Age series of reprints of sf titles – at least ten all told, most of them Scientific Romances ...
Maine, Charles Eric
Pseudonym used by UK author David McIlwain (1921-1981) for his sf; two other pseudonyms, Richard Rayner and Robert Wade, were used for detective thrillers. Maine was one of the relatively few but extremely active UK fans before World War Two, and in 1938 published his first story, "The Mirror", in his Fanzine The Satellite, which he edited with Jonathan Burke; he also appeared in the fanzine ...
Scientific Errors
Scientific errors in sf are not to be confused with Imaginary Science, where the author invents the science and tries to make it plausible, nor with Pseudoscience, where the author adheres to some alternative quasiscientific system unrecognized by the majority of the scientific community. Scientific errors are here taken to mean plain mistakes. / Sf in the days of the Pulp magazines was very ...
Ambrose, David
(1943- ) UK author and screenwriter, with more than twenty film credits before the turn of the century, including the script for Amityville 3-D (1983). He also scripted the television Alternative 3 (1977) and directed one film for television, Comeback (1987), a borderline medical thriller whose focus on abnormal Psychology prefigures much of his fiction. ...
Metaltech
Videogame series (from 1994). Dynamix. / After developing the first MechWarrior game in the late 1980s (see Battletech), Dynamix lost the licence to Activision. Their response was to create their own version of the Battletech (1984) universe, featuring HERCULANs (human and AI piloted bipedal robots) in a unique Future History, ...
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 ...