SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 February 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 16 February 2026
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Kenyon, Kay
(1956- ) US author who has worked as an urban planner, a profession reflected in the architectonic solidity of her worldbuilding. From her first novel, The Seeds of Time (1997), her work has been notable for its focus on the particular nature of the planets where she sets her sometimes overcomplicated human dramas. She is a good example of the evolution of the perhaps over-egged 1980s debate between Cyberpunk writers and ...
Perimeter
Videogame (2004). K-D Lab (KDL). Designed by Andrey Kuzmin, Yulia Shaposhnikova, Michail Piskounov. Platforms: Win. / Perimeter is a Real Time Strategy game, set in a sequence of sub-worlds located in a region known as the Psychosphere (or, in a less felicitous translation from the original Russian, the Sponge). The Psychosphere is a separate layer of reality, one in which human fears and dreams become ...
Schoenherr, John
(1935-2010) US illustrator, today best known for his animal illustration, who was regarded by some critics as the finest sf artist of his generation. Born in New York City, Schoenherr studied at the Art Students League of New York and the Pratt Institute. He made his sf-Illustration debut in Amazing in 1956. His genre work appeared primarily in Astounding/Analog (including 75 ...
Hubbard, Wynant Davis
(1900-1961) US foreign correspondent, travel and nature author, and author of The Thousandth Frog: A Scientific Fantasy (8 June-13 July 1935 The Passing Show; 1935), a Young Adult tale in which humanity must defend itself from an Invasion of southern America by giant insects and giant frogs, all created through a drought-caused high concentration of iodine in breeding pools ...
Paterson, Isabel
(1886-1961) Canadian journalist, literary critic and author, in the US from around 1915, whose The God of the Machine (1943) originated many of the tenets of libertarianism (see Libertarian SF) whose intellectual interactions with Ayn Rand from the 1930s on were mutually influential. Of her fiction, The Road of the Gods (1930) is a Lost Race novel set in Germany 2,000 ...
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 ...