SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 December 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 8 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Wyatt, Rachel
(1929- ) UK-born dramatist and author, in Canada from 1957; of some sf interest is her first novel, The String Box (1970), set in a surrealized but seemingly Near Future City (see Absurdist SF) whose inhabitants follow maddening sets of rules to survive; possession of the eponymous box counts enormously. [JC]
Hollinger, Veronica
(1947- ) Canadian editor and academic, at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario until her retirement in 2016; she has been an editor of Science Fiction Studies from 1991, publishing with her co-editors two Anthologies of significance, On Philip K Dick: 40 Articles from Science Fiction Studies (anth 1992) with Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, ...
Cawthorn, James
(1929-2008) UK illustrator, critic and author; he often used the working name Jim Cawthorn, though he also went by J Cawthorn or simply Cawthorn, and his name was sometimes rendered as Cawthorne. After he entered sf around 1954, his career was largely defined by his relationship with Michael Moorcock – the men quickly bonded due to their shared interest in Edgar Rice Burroughs – and they first worked ...
Onopa, Robert
(1943- ) US academic and author of The Pleasure Tube (1979), a tale in which an astronaut returns from space to a hallucinatory America and becomes entrapped, in the narrative present tense, in a Sex machine; Barry N Malzberg's influence seems clear. With David G Hartwell he edited Triquarterly 49 (anth 1980), a special sf issue of the magazine ...
Supersonic Saucer
Film (1956). Gaumont British Picture Corporation/British Lion Film Corporation. Directed by Guy Fergusson. Written by Dallas Bower from a story by Frank Wells. Cast includes Fella Edmonds, Gillian Harrison, Tony Lyons and Marcia Monolescue. 50 minutes. Black and white. / A small, friendly Alien from Venus is found and "adopted" by a group of schoolchildren from an English countryside school. The alien is pursued by criminals who ...
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 ...