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Tuesday 27 January 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 26 January 2026
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Rabe, Jean
(1957-2026) US game designer, author and editor who began to publish work of genre interest with "Grandfather's Toys" in Realms of Valor (anth 1993) edited by James Lowder, an anthology tied to the Forgotten Realms Shared World. Much of Rabe's work is tied to other fantasy and supernatural franchises such as Dragonlance and Rogue Angel [see Checklist below]; contributions to the latter sequence appear as by Alex ...
Kessel, John
(1950- ) US academic and author who began publishing sf with "The Silver Man" in Galileo for May 1978, and whose short fiction rapidly established him as an author of cunningly pastiche-heavy, erudite stories. His two best known early tales – both assembled with other work in Meeting in Infinity: Allegories & Extrapolations (coll 1992) – are probably "Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!" (September 1981 ...
Desart, The Earl of
Title of UK author William Ulick O'Connor Cuffe (1845-1898), styled Viscount Castlecuffe until he assumed the earldom at the age of 20 in 1865. He signed all his books "The Earl of Desart"; several of the stories assembled as Love and Pride on an Iceberg and Other Stories (coll 1887) are sf, at least two of them anticipating with comic apprehension a Near Future in which women are emancipated (his widow became the first woman Senator in the Irish ...
Fendall, Percy
(1850-1917) French-born playwright author, raised in Australia but in the UK by early manhood; in his Near Future sf Satire, Lady Ermyntrude and the Plumber: A Love Tale of MCMXX (1912), the passage of the Great Compulsory Work Act, and the suppression of the House of Lords, creates a society in which everyone must work to live, including the king and queen, who become hotel proprietors. [JC]
Centauri Express, The
US audio magazine (see Audiozine) which ran for five releases, undated other than by year, between September 1987 and April 1990. It never kept to its planned quarterly schedule. Each release consisted of a single audiocassette lasting ninety minutes. On each side was a fully dramatized adaptation of a story performed by the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company of Atlanta, Georgia under the overall direction of Thomas E Fuller (1948-2002), who had first proposed the ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...