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Monday 16 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
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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 ...
Grip [2]
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Monster Municipality, or Gog and Magog Reformed: A Dream (1882), a Dystopian prediction that socialist reforms will torture England in 1885; and How John Bull Lost London, or The Capture of the Channel Tunnel (1882), one of the earlier Future-War novels – if not the earliest – to warn against a tunnel ...
Cole, Walter R
(1933-2002) US sf fan and bibliographer, compiler of A Checklist of Science-Fiction Anthologies (1964), reissued in facsimile – it was originally stencilled – by Arno Press in 1975. Though it has now been superseded and updated by William Contento's indexes of Anthologies, it is remembered as one of the essential pioneering efforts in ...
Dowling, Steve
(1904-1986) UK artist known almost solely for the Comic strip Garth (which see for bibliography), although he worked on other strips as well. He received his formal art training from the Liverpool School of Art and then the Westminster School of Art, before taking to comics art. He illustrated Garth – briefly scripting it at the outset until author J H G "Don" Freeman was brought in – from 1943 until his ...
Web of Mystery
US Comic (1951-1955). Ace Magazines. 29 issues. Artists include Lou Cameron, Jim McLaughlin, Kenneth Rice and Mike Sekowsky. Script writers include Paul Parker and Robert Turner. 36 pages, with 3-4 long strips, 1-2 one-page strips purporting to tell true stories of horror, plus a short text story. / Web of Mystery was predominantly a Horror comic, but regularly had sf tales or ones with sf ...
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 ...