SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 20 May 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 18 May 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Grossman, Dave
(1956- ) German-born US author, a former lieutenant colonel in the US Army and student of the psychology of killing [see Checklist below]. He began to publish sf with The War with Earth (2003) and Kren of the Mitchegai (2004), both in collaboration with Leo Frankowski (whom see for description); these are the second and third books in the A Boy and His Tank/New Kashubia ...
Griffith, Mary
(1772-1846) French-born author, in US from 1776; she changed her name from Mary Corré to Mary Griffith on marrying John Griffith (1768-1815), and published as Griffith after his death. Her nonfiction studies in horticulture and general scientific topics were respected. She is of sf interest for a Utopia, Three Hundred Years Hence (1950), which originally appeared as one of the stories in ...
Ma, Yiming
(1989- ) Chinese-born financial analyst and author, in US and Canada from childhood. His first novel, These Memories do Not Belong to Us (2025), is a collection of linked stories he has dubbed a "constellation novel": in this case, an array of tales, told through the coercive mediation of an intracranial device known as the Mindblank lodged in the hippocampus. In a moderately distant Near Future ...
Wells, Robert
(1929-2021) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Machine That Was Lonely" in the Observer in 1954, one of that newspaper's prize competition stories assembled as A.D. 2500: The Observer Prize Stories (anth 1954) edited anonymously. Wells later concentrated on novels, beginning with The Parasaurians (1969), in which fake safaris against Robot Dinosaurs turn into a more serious threat to the hero ...
Gems, Jonathan
(1952- ) US screenwriter and author of Mars Attacks! (1996), a Tie to the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks! (1996), which it novelizes. This film's screenplay was also by Gems, based on the "Mars Attacks" series of Topps trading cards (1962); he had earlier co-scripted Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), based on ...
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 ...