SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 13 July 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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Taylor, Charles Henry
(1863-1950) US lawyer, entrepreneur and author of By Wireless from Venus (1922), a lightly fictionalized report, conveyed by radio Communications from Venus, describing life in the Solar System. Some civilizations are advanced Utopias but others are not. [JC]
Wellington, David
(1971- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Chuy and the Fish" in The Undead (anth 2005) edited by Elijah Hall and D L Snell; also writes as D Nolan Clark, a pseudonym restricted to his sf. Most of Wellington's work has been horror, with an emphasis on Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies (see Horror in SF). His first ...
Chilling Monster Tales
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema Magazine printed on newsprint-quality paper. One issue only: August 1966. Published by MM Publishing Ltd from New York. No editor named. / Chilling Monster Tales consisted chiefly of uncredited summaries of classic Monster or Horror films including House of Frankenstein (1944) (see ...
Spooner, Meagan
(1985- ) US author much of whose work has been in collaboration with Amie Kaufman, her three Young Adult series comprising the bulk of her work. Her first series, which is solo, the Skylark sequence beginning with Skylark (2012), is set Equipoisally in a domed Dystopian Keep surrounded by a ...
Taboos
The Polynesian word "tabu", from which the English term is taken, was first recorded in 1777 by Captain James Cook (1728-1779) near the end of his last tour of the South Pacific on behalf of the expanding British empire; unsurprisingly perhaps, the word "taboo" was initially applied by early anthropologists to representative of other, exotic, "inferior" cultures: white civilization had evolved beyond taboo (see Evolution). Within that frame of application, the term ...
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 ...