SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 April 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 13 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Birkmaier, Elizabeth G
(1847-1912) US author, known only for her sf novel about Atlantis, Poseidon's Paradise: The Romance of Atlantis (1892); the Island, whose rulers are corrupt, sinks after an earthquake, though two abducted royal European children escape to what will become Greece, which they begin to civilize, aided by Atlantean lore. [JC]
Bentley, Norman S
(1867-? ) US lawyer and author whose Future War novel Armada of the Air (1937) counts as an extremely early Hitler Wins tale, though the emphasis here is more on the governmental fanaticism that has disarmed Great Britain by 1946 than on the four dictators (one of them Hitler by clear inference) who wage war by air (the armada boasts thousands of planes) on their hapless foe. [JC]
Meidän poikamme ilmassa – me maassa
["Our Boys in the Air, Us on the Ground"] Finnish film (1934). Suomen Filmiteollisuus. Directed and written by Erkki Karu. Cast includes Kaarlo Angerkoski, Martta Kontula, Joel Rinne and Irja Simola. 121 minutes. Black and white. / Pilots of the Finnish air force compete in a race across southern Finland to test the limits of their planes. In the process, two of them fall in love with women they meet on their travels. When a fire breaks out at a farmhouse, Erkki (Angerkoski) rushes ...
Machine, The
Film (2013). Red & Black Films. Directed and written by Caradog W James. Cast includes Jade Croot, Helen Griffin, Pooneh Hajimohammadi, Denis Lawson, Caity Lotz, Jean-Paul Macleod and Toby Stephens. 91 minutes. Colour. / There is no backstory; by the year 2013, it may be, the makers of The Machine felt none would be necessary. The viewer is dumped in medias res into a desolate surveillance-heavy Near Future England just as a ...
Payne, Paul L
(1921-1992) US editor and author, who edited Planet Stories between 1946 and 1950, and who published some Space Operas, notably The Cructars Are Coming (Summer 1952 Two Complete Science-Adventure Books; 2008 ebook), in which Martians (see Mars) are wrongly accused of causing mass deaths on Earth. [JC]
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 ...