SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 17 May 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.
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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Iconoclasm
An essential part of sf is change; indeed it may be said that the belief that the circumstances of human life were bound to keep on changing provided the most powerful stimulus for the creation of the genre. Nevertheless, it is obvious from experience that all changes, technical or social, encounter resistance ranging from the perfunctory to the desperate, as a result of human inertia. Much sf, then, is concerned with the nature of that resistance, its unexpected force, the most efficacious ...
Daikaijū Gamera
Film (1965; vt Gamera). Daiei. Directed by Noriaki Yuasa. Written by Fumi Takahashi. Cast includes Albert Dekker (US version), Brian Donlevy (US version), Diane Findlay (US version), Eiji Funakoshi and Harumi Kiritachi. 88 minutes. Colour. / This was Daiei Studios' answer to the enormously successful Gojira ["Godzilla"] films from Toho Studios. Gamera is a giant prehistoric turtle, restored to life by nuclear testing. It attacks Tokyo, naturally, ...
Muller, Robert
(1925-1998) German author, playwright and screenwriter, in the UK from 1938. His sf novel is The Lost Diaries of Albert Smith (1965; vt After All, This Is England 1967), a Near Future Dystopia in which the consequences of a fascist takeover of Britain are examined. Also in the 1960s he adapted two stories by Isaac Asimov and one by Clifford D ...
Fahy, Christopher
(1937- ) US author whose first works – like The Compost Heap (1970) – convey in mundane contexts a quiet enragedness that can seem scattershot. After his first story with genre content, "Carnival" for Gallery in August 1980 – assembled with much of his short fiction of fantastic interest in Matinee at the Flame (coll 2006) – most of his later work of interest is Horror, though ...
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 ...