SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 30 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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May, Peter
(1951-2026) Scottish journalist, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970; resident in France from around 2000. During the first twenty-five years of his career as a screenwriter, he was involved in something like 1,000 television productions, all seemingly nonfantastic. He began to publish fiction with The Reporter (1978), which he serialized for the BBC; most of his later novels were crime thrillers, including the China Thrillers beginning with ...
Huberath, Marek S
Pseudonym of Polish biophysicist Hubert Harańczyk (1954- ), who as an author entered the Genre SF field with "Wrocieeś Sneogg, wiedziaam ..." (September 1987 Fantastyka; trans Michael Kandel as "Yoo Retoont, Sneogg. Ay Noo" – see Checklist), which won that magazine's second short story competition. It is an intense and existentially frightening meditation on the ...
Anderson, Poul
(1926-2001) US author born in Pennsylvania of Scandinavian parents; he lived in Denmark briefly before the outbreak of World War Two. In 1948 he gained a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota. His knowledge of Scandinavian languages and literature and his scientific literacy fed each other fruitfully through a long and successful career, during which he gained for overall achievement the SFWA Grand Master Award in 1978; he was inducted ...
Vopěnka, Martin
(1963- ) Czech publisher and author, active from about 1989, whose Pátý Rozmeř (2009; trans Hana Sklenkova as The Fifth Dimension 2015) is an example of Fantastika whose incorporation of sf elements achieves a bleakly deliberated abstractness that removes the text very far from Genre SF, or indeed from the tale of political/cultural ...
Gear, Kathleen O'Neal
(1954- ) US author with extensive training in American prehistory; married to W Michael Gear from 1982. Her first sf, the Powers of Light trilogy – An Abyss of Light (1990), Treasure of Light (1991) and Redemption of Light (1991) – was published as by Kathleen M O'Neal. With an occasionally oppressive relentlessness about the moral and theological issues involved, it presents ...
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 ...