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Thursday 12 March 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.
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Stone, George
(? - ) US author whose Near Future sf novel Blizzard (1977; vt Freeze 1979) in which an American admiral, by activating sea-bottom nuclear reactors, creates a circular blizzard system that eventually covers most of America. The ultimate consequence is Climate Change leading to a new Ice Age. [JC]
Carrel, Frederic
(1859-1945) UK author whose portrait of Frank Harris in an early novel, The Adventures of John Johns (1897), has been a source of misinformation about Harris for more than a century. Paul le Maistre (1901) is not sf, the invention at the heart of the book being a better plough; on the other hand, the Inventions of the Antihero ruler of an ambivalently ...
Lunatic, Sir Humphry
Pseudonym used by Irish actor, critic, playwright and author Francis Gentleman (1728-1784), whose working years were spent mostly in England, for a Proto SF imitation – and perhaps conscious Parody of – the Fantastic Voyage as found in the work of Cyrano de Bergerac and others; the tale, ...
BlöödHag
US death metal/grindcore band based in Seattle, Washington, which unusually focused on sf, fantasy and horror authors in short songs homaging and providing some sketchy bio-bibliographical information on their subjects; in live performances they would often throw books at the audience. The original 1996 band members were Jeff McNulty (guitar), Jake Stratton (vocals), Zachary Orgel (bass) and a drum machine subsequently replaced by Rod Karp (drums) and later by Brent Carpenter (drums). Their ...
Charyn, Jerome
(1937- ) US author who was born and educated in New York, which city he gradually transformed in his fiction into a Magic-Realist venue whose mythopoeic resonances and exorbitant happenings hover (see Equipoise) at the edge of generic displacements (and beyond), and strongly prefigure the fabulated New York of writers like John Crowley, Mark ...
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 ...