SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 10 June 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 8 June 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Roberts, Wilfred Joseph
(1898-1976) UK illustrator, active from the early 1930s, almost exclusively for magazines and publishers whose works were deemed ephemeral, so that much of his output remains obscure; he is thought to have normally signed his work W J Roberts, W F Roberts or L J Roberts, though much may be anonymous or under other names. He is credited in this encyclopedia for three volumes of the Gees sequence by E Charles Vivian writing as Jack Mann, ...
Schildiner, Frank
(? - ) US author much of whose work samples familiar (and sometimes less familiar) figures from Pulp literature, usually French, both fantastic and nonfantastic, in complicatedly juggled narratives. Most of his work manipulates the networks of association of Fantastika, though the sf element in this weaving of story-types is not often dominant. The Frankenstein sequence beginning with ...
LaHaye, Tim
(1926-2016) US evangelical minister, "prophecy scholar" and author with Jerry B Jenkins of the thirteen-book Left Behind sequence which depicts the Holocaust that ravages the world in terms of fundamentalist beliefs in the Rapture which precedes/accompanies the Second Coming of Christ. The series is not normally (or properly) read as sf, as the Godgame implications of the story arc take it far beyond ...
Hughes, Dorothy B
(1904-1993) US author, active from around 1930, of hard-edged, noirish detective novels. She also wrote one sf novel, The Delicate Ape (1944), which involves international intrigue a decade hence in a Near Future New York, where a defeated Germany has been plotting to gain international approval, at the upcoming "Peace Conclave", for the end of Allied occupation and for the right to re-arm. The threat of ...
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 ...
