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Tuesday 15 September 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.
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Hird, James Dennis
(1850-1920) UK author involved in nineteenth-century temperance movements and Christian socialism: he was Warden of Ruskin College in Oxford – a working-class college located in Oxford to underline some obvious points about the class-structure of British education – from its founding in 1899 until 1909. Toddle Island; Being the Diary of Lord Bottsford (1894) as by Lord Bottsford, is an Erewhonian Utopia set on an ...
Corston, George
(1932- ) UK author of Aftermath (1968), an exceedingly grim vision of England after a nuclear Disaster that has driven what remains of the land into martial law and useless defiance of the inevitable; the protagonist, cursing his fate, dies of leukaemia. It is the case that, as with this title, surprisingly unconventional tales sometimes slipped into the Robert Hale Limited list, which ...
Black Hood
US Comic (1943-1946). MLJ Magazines/Archie Comics. 11 issues (numbered #9 – #19). Artists include Red Holmdale, Everett Kinstler, Irv Novick and Clem Weisbecker. Script writers include Bill Woolfolk; Otto Binder (see Eando Binder) wrote one script, mentioned below. Initially 60 pages, declining to 52, with 4-5 strips (three featuring the Black Hood), plus a short text story (in #9 a nonfiction piece, "Is Germany's Secret Weapon ...
Crowder, Herbert
(1925-2022) US MIT graduate who served in World War Two and is the author of three Technothrillers of some sf interest: Ambush at Osirak (1988), with a threatened Israeli attack on a nuclear reactor installation (see Power Sources) in Iraq, which country has been armed with a Russian super-Weapon; Weatherhawk (1990), which involves ...
DeStefano, Lauren
(1984- ) US author who has concentrated exclusively on Near Future Dystopias for the Young Adult market. The Chemical Garden Trilogy, comprising Wither (2011), Fever (2012) and Sever (2013), is set in an American culture savagely distorted by the consequences of a Genetic Engineering ...
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 ...