SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 April 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 13 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty – universal nickname for the statue in New York harbour whose official name is "Liberty Enlightening the World" – took some time to climb her pedestal. Shortly after he had designed a lighthouse for the entrance to the Suez Canal in 1867, based on an École des Beaux-Arts-inspired reverence for colossal art of the Classic Era, the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi (1834-1904) received a commission from the government of France to create a statue ...
Sym-Bionic Titan
US animated tv series (2010-2011). Orphanage Animation Studios, Cartoon Network Studios. Created by Bryan Andrews, Paul Rudish and Genndy Tartakovsky. Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky. Writers include Darrick Bachman, Mitch Larson and Genndy Tartakovsky. Voice cast includes John DiMaggio, Don Leslie, Brian Posehn, Tim Russ, Tara Strong and Kevin Thoms. Twenty 22-minute episodes. Colour. / The planet Galaluna has undergone ...
Barker, Jim
(? - ) Scots artist active in Fandom since the mid-1970s, contributing many cartoons to Fanzines including Maya (there often illustrating humorous essays and speeches by Bob Shaw) and occasionally Ansible and Vector. Some early work was signed with the anagrammatic pseudonym J Mike Barr. His ...
Atherton, Gertrude
(1857-1948) US author, biographer and historian. In a long career that extended from 1882 to 1946 she published about 50 books in a multitude of genres, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Caves of Death" for San Francisco News Letter in 1886; her first novel was an occult romance involving metempsychosis, What Dreams May Come: A Romance (1888) as by Frank Lin (see Reincarnation). In ...
Long, Frank Belknap
(1901-1994) US editor author of sf and fantasy, including some Comics in the 1940s (see Adventures into the Unknown), whose professional working life extended from 1924 to the 1980s; he was married to Lyda Belknap Long (née Lyda Arco) from 1960; under her name he wrote a series of Gothics [see Checklist]. His birth year is often listed as 1903, since Long misrepresented his age at the start of his career and ...
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 ...