SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Dream Hacking
Term used in this encyclopedia for the now frequent sf trope in which entry is made into someone's personal dreams or mental landscape (as though this literal Inner Space were a physical geography or Pocket Universe) to study or influence the contents. This has long been imagined as an intriguing technique of future Psychology. / A pioneering sf example is Peter ...
Quinn, Seabury
(1889-1969) American lawyer and weird-fiction author whose first published story was "The Law of the Movies" (December 1917 The Motion Picture Magazine). Seabury Quinn was by far the most prolific contributor to Weird Tales; during its 31-year life he published well over a hundred stories there, appearing on average in roughly every other issue. Many of these contributions – 93 in all – featured his occult detective Jules de Grandin ...
City of Heroes
Videogame (2004). Cryptic Studios (CS). Platforms: Win (2004); Mac (2009). / City of Heroes was a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, set in a "four colour" Superhero world similar to that of classic Comic books from DC Comics and ...
Super Mario Bros.
Film (1993). Lightmotive/Allied Filmmakers in association with Cinergi Productions and Hollywood Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company). Produced by Jake Eberts and Roland Joffe. Directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel. Written by Parker Bennett & Terry Runte and Ed Solomon based on the concept and characters created by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka of Nintendo. Cast includes Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Samantha ...
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 ...