SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 July 2025
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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Bennett, Cherie
(1960- ) US author of Young Adult novels, of a script – "Jitters" (2001) – for the television series Smallville (2001-2011) (see Superman); and, with her husband Jeff Gottesfeld (a Smallville scriptwriter), a series of Ties to the same series. One Young Adult novel of interest is Anne Frank and Me ...
Freiberger, Fred
(1915-2003) Film and Television writer and producer, noted for producing the final season of the original Star Trek (1966-1969), and perhaps somewhat unfairly blamed for the lower quality of that last season. With the series suffering from a reduced production budget and aired in a time slot where it had no chance of decent ratings, there was little more that he could have done. Previously, Freiberger wrote screenplays for ...
de Morgan, John
(1848-1926) UK author who misleadingly claimed to have been born in Ireland; in US (where he worked as a tax collector) from 1880; his name at birth was John Francis Morgan, but he may have changed it legally. He produced fantastic fiction, historical novels, miscellaneous works and Dime Novels, drawing very heavily on the work of H Rider Haggard for models and sources. His adult fantastic fiction included four H Rider ...
Alternate Worlds
An alternate world – some writers and commentators prefer the designation "alternative world" on grammatical grounds – is an account of Earth as it might have become in consequence of some hypothetical alteration in history. Many sf stories use Parallel Worlds as a frame in which multiple alternate worlds can coexist, sometimes interacting with one another. Previous editions of this encyclopedia discussed ...
Amazing Mystery Funnies
US Comic (1938-1940). Twenty-four issues. Centaur Publishing. Artists and script writers (usually performing both tasks) include Harry Campbell, Bill Everett, Paul Gustavson, Malcolm Kildale, George Loomis and Basil Wolverton. Usually 7-9 strips and a two-page text story each issue, plus brief factual articles ("many serious defects may result from a child sucking his thumb"); the December 1939 issue includes a two-page review of Fanzines, ...
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 ...