SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 July 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 20 July 2026
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Salinger, Pierre
(1925-2004) US journalist – best known for his stint as John F Kennedy's press secretary from 1961 – briefly US Senator for California in 1964, and author. His very Near Future tale, On Instructions of My Government (1971), describes the consequences of the discovery of a Chinese Communist missile base in South America. [JC]
SF Megatext
Science fiction is written in a kind of code, a difficult vernacular learned through an apprenticeship. Its decoding depends importantly on access to a megatext – the huge body of established moves or reading protocols that the reader learns through immersion in many hundreds of sf short stories and novels (and, with significantly less sophistication, from movies, television episodes, and games). The sf megatext comprises a virtual encyclopedia and specialized dictionary. For a story to ...
Moore, Jonathan
(? - ) US lawyer and author whose first novel, Redheads (2013), is horror whose thrust to the edges of the genre stops just short of the fantastic. Of direct sf interest is The Night Market (2018), set in the shambles of Near Future San Francisco, follows its investigator protagonist into a conspiracy-driven nightmare of commodified late-capitalist privatization/privation, where consumption is ...
Invasion
Futuristic fiction in the UK was given a tremendous boost by the success of George T Chesney's clever piece of propaganda, The Battle of Dorking (May 1871 Blackwood's Magazine; 1871 chap), which put the case for army reform and rearmament by offering a dramatic illustration of the ease with which the UK might fall to an invading German army (see Battle of Dorking). This became the foundation-stone ...
Credits
In sf Terminology, a credit is a unit of Money. Credits are used widely in tales of the future. [PN]
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 ...