SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 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 14 July 2025
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Maddock, Reginald
(1912-1994) UK author, mostly for Young Adult readers. His first sf novel, The Time Maze (1960), is a literate Time Travel tale whose protagonists, lost in a mysterious cave, find that its innumerable luminescent passages take them to exemplary experiences in three past eras: the time of the Dinosaurs, of Neanderthal man, and in a Neolithic community. Unusually, it is women not men who ...
Sagas, L M
(? - ) US author of the slightly spoofish Ambit's Run Space Opera sequence beginning with Cascade Failure (2024). The interstellar Space Opera setting, in which a for-profit corporation vies with a vast union, both under the aegis of a monitoring Guild, provides opportunities for action in space and on planets. An AI-governed ...
Bedford-Jones, H
(1887-1949) Canadian-born author, mostly in the US from the turn of the century, later a naturalized US citizen, one of the most prolific and popular pulp writers over the course of his professional career (circa 1910-1949); of his approximately 1200 short stories, at least 10% were fantasy, Pulp sf or horror; and of his nearly 100 novels, several – e.g., The Star Woman (1924), set in Canada during the fur-trading territorial disputes of the ...
Hauru no Ugoku Shiro
Japanese animated film (2004; vt Howl's Moving Castle). Studio Ghibli. Based on the novel Howl's Moving Castle (1986) by Diana Wynne Jones. Directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki. Voice cast includes Chieko Baisho, Tatsuya Gashuin, Ryūnosuke Kamiki, Takuya Kimura and Akihiro Miwa. 119 minutes. Colour. / When staid young hatmaker Sophie (Baisho) meets the ...
King, Ron
(? - ) US teacher and author, the protagonist of whose Young Adult tale, The Quantum July (2007), makes the Discovery of a capacity to shift between Parallel Worlds, and uses his ability to look for a reality in which his parents have not separated. [JC]
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 ...