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Thursday 19 February 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 18 February 2026
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Schimel, Lawrence
(1971- ) US poet, story writer, editor and translator resident in Spain since 1999 where he combines his own writing in both Spanish and English with work as a literary translator. His first genre story was "The Last Bite" in Dead of Night #6 in July 1990 and by the end of the decade had published nearly 100 stories, many with gay/lesbian or Vampire themes, and issued his first collection, ...
Tompkins, Walker A
(1909-1988) US author, mostly of Westerns; he is of sf interest for Ozar the Aztec (January 1933-June 1933 Street and Smith's Top-Notch all sections under the House Name Valentine Wood; fixup 1935), a Lost Race tale whose inhabitants, under the leadership of Ozar, survive in the contemporary West. [JC]
To-day and To-morrow
This relatively early venture in popular Futures Studies comprises a series of eighty-six hardback monographs published from 1923 by the London house Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company. In these slim volumes, Scientists and others speculated (not always entirely seriously) about the future. Several of them also wrote Scientific Romances, a form well designed to incorporate the ...
Hypertext
Hypertext can be defined as a way of organizing textual information which allows users to move from one section, or node, to another along various routes, or links. It is generally assumed that this scheme is implemented on a computer system; this encyclopedia is itself an example of hypertext. The idea of somehow automating the retrieval of information from a common store appears repeatedly in the writings of the early twentieth century, as in the Permanent World Encyclopedia suggested by H G ...
North, William
(1825-1854) UK author whose precocious first novel, Anti-Coningsby; Or, The New Generation Grown Old (1844 2vols), is a Satire shaped as a Sequel by Other Hands to Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby; Or, the New Generation (1844), in which new Inventions are used to sink the French fleet, and a very ...
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 ...