SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 15 June 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 15 June 2026
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Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Silverstein, Janna
(1962- ) US editor, critic and author, in the latter capacity initially of fantasy stories beginning with "Her Mother's Cries" in Ghosttide (anth 1993) edited by Claudia O'Keefe; more recently she has written at least one Hard SF tale, "After This Life" (2008 Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show). With Tom Dupree and ...
Bunch, David R
(1925-2000) US poet and author, whose longest paid employment was as a civilian cartographer for the US Air Force 1954-1973. It has been estimated – or claimed, apparently first by Judith Merril – that he published as many as 200 short stories before beginning to publish work of genre interest professionally with "Routine Emergency" in If for December 1957, though an earlier involvement with Fandom ...
Dickson, Gordon R
(1923-2001) Canadian-born author, in the USA since age 13, becoming an American citizen many decades before his death; half-brother of Lovat Dickson. He was educated (along with Poul Anderson) at the University of Minnesota, taking his BA in English in 1948, and remained in Minnesota. After World War Two he re-established the Minneapolis Fantasy Society, with Anderson a central participant (Clifford D ...
Harker, Kenneth
(1927-2003) UK author with a training in physics, employed as a technical officer in the thermal insulation business, whose first published sf story was "Cog" in New Worlds, April 1966; he had previously sold crime and fantasy fiction, an earlier nonrealistic story being "Colossus of Roads" (August 1961 Storyteller). His sf novels – The Symmetrians (1966), which concerns a ...
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 ...