SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 12 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 8 June 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Wodehouse, P G
(1881-1975) UK author, who also wrote as by Basil Windham; mostly in the USA from long before World War Two, never again in England after his scurrilous treatment during that war; active from 1900; known mainly for his non-fantastic novels and story collections – all of them comic after about 1909 – which were published in a highly prolific, almost unbroken stream from The Pothunters (1902), a school story for boys, to the end of his life (see ...
Ray, Satyajit
(1921-1992) Indian film-maker and author, best known in the former capacity; beginning with Pather Panchali (1955), he made about thirty feature films, and is generally recognized as the finest Indian director to date. His fiction, much less well known outside India, was generally restricted to series of tales, including the Feluda sequence [not listed below] of detective stories featuring a Sherlock Holmes figure, accompanied by a ...
Calmadenker, A
Pseudonym of Dutch-born author, born Jacobus Calisch (1863-1926), a resident in the USA apparently from early adulthood; he changed his name to James Howard Calish in 1906. In his The Mania of the Nations on the Planet Mars, and its Terrific Consequences: A Combination of Fun and Wisdom (1915 chap), tantalizingly, the history of Mars – here narrated at length via an access platform sited at the South Pole (see ...
Scithers, George H
(1929-2010) US author, editor, publisher and military engineer; with the US Army 1946-1973, retiring with the rank of Colonel. He began publishing fiction of genre interest with "The Faithful Messenger" in If for March 1969 as George Scithers with no middle initial, and the gay pornographic sf novel Hung in Space (1969) as by Felix Lance Falkon (a pseudonym he would use for other erotic/pornographic fiction and artwork); later he wrote a spoof cookery book ...
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 ...