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Monday 14 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2025
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Gadallah, Leslie
(1939- ) Canadian chemist, technical editor and author best known for her Empire of Kaz sequence – starting with Cat's Pawn (1987) – in which a human protagonist becomes involved with the eponymous Cat-like Alien Orioni, themselves involved in a desperate war against the invading Kazi, who dominate much of the Galaxy by the end of the second volume, Cat's Gambit (1990), ...
Kirk, Pauline
(? - ) UK poet and author of The Keepers (1996), a Dystopia set in a Near Future UK run by the eponymous Keepers on lines mildly evocative of George Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four (1949), with fairly rife regimentation and some brainwashing. But a dissident group imports a virus into the Keeper's central ...
Mason, Gregory
(1889-1968) US doctor and author whose novel, The Green Gold of Yucatan (1926), is a Lost Race tale, and whose sf Dystopia, The Golden Archer: A Satirical Novel of 1975 (1956), is a Satire depicting an America suffering under regimented, McCarthy-like bigotry and Religious strife. This author should not be confused with Gregory Mason, a pseudonym ...
McGee, Katharine
(1988- ) US author whose first series, the Young Adult romance-inflected Thousandth Floor sequence beginning with The Thousandth Floor (2016), takes place in and around the eponymous Keep-like high-rise in moderately Near Future New York, with the poor inhabiting lower floors and the rich the regions above. In sf tales featuring ...
Neutron Stars
Item of Terminology in Astronomy, and much used in sf. In an ordinary star, such as the Sun, the gravitational pressure tending to make it collapse is balanced by the outward pressure created by the continuous nuclear fusion within it. As a star's fuel burns out, Gravity takes over. A star of mass less than the Chandrasekhar limit – a value calculated by Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar ...
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 ...