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Wednesday 9 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
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Searles, A Langley
(1920-2009) US Fanzine publisher and Professor of Chemistry at the College of Mount St Vincent, New York (he retired in 1987); as publisher from 1943 of Fantasy Commentator (which see for details), he maintained the journal as a significant forum for the study of sf in many of its aspects, though concentrating on early Genre SF. In 1999 he was inducted into the ...
MacLennan, Hugh
(1907-1990) Canadian author who early published two Dystopian tales, "The Finding of the Way" (29 April 1955 The Montrealer) and "Remembrance Day, 2010 A.D." (December 1957 The Montrealer), but almost all of whose works, like his second novel, Two Solitudes (1945), lay outside the field and were shaped by the search for a Canadian national myth. His only sf novel, Voices in Time (1980), whose ...
Posnick, Paul
(? - ) US author of a Near Future sf novel, Weather War (1978) with Leonard Leokum, in which the major powers, as World War Three threatens, explore the possibilities of using the technology of Weather Control against one another. [JC]
Richardson, Maurice
(1907-1978) UK journalist and author whose principal genre contribution is a collection of Club Stories, The Exploits of Engelbrecht: Abstracted from the Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportsman's Club (stories June 1946-April 1950 Lilliput; coll of linked stories 1950; exp 2000). This, with enjoyable absurdist Humour, involves Engelbrecht – a dwarf "Surrealist Boxer" – in such unlikely ...
Online Worlds
Any game involving more than one person is played in a kind of Shared World, even if that world only exists until one of the participants has won. Such places gained a greater degree of permanence in Role Playing Games, where the Gamemaster might create an episodic campaign taking years to complete, and in the Play by Mail industry, in which the moderator ...
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 ...