SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 17 February 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Elliott, Sumner Locke
(1917-1991) Australian-born actor, playwright, television scriptwriter and author, resident in the USA from 1948 – after a conflict with the notorious 1940s Australian censorship regime, due to the use of the word "fuck" in his play about soldiers at war, Rusty Bugles (performed 1948; 1980) – becoming a US citizen in 1955. There is no entry on Elliott in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Several of his novels, usually with Australian settings, were ...
Kadohata, Cynthia
(1956- ) US author who has focused primarily on Young Adult fiction, most of it nonfantastic. Of sf interest is In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992), set in a Near Future Los Angeles, which has by 2052 become an impoverished, ill-governed, hardscrabble. Dystopian enclave. The protagonist, unusually for an sf novel set in ...
Bibliographies
For students of science fiction, here luckily distinguished from students of what were once called non-genre literatures, bibliography is the second arm of criticism. Science fiction bibliography encompasses both description (physical description of the books of a single author or press) and context (what was published, in what significant form, when, and where). Compiling checklists and bibliographies was initially and has to a surprising extent remained a labour of love, very often carried ...
Scrap Book, The
US Pulp magazine published monthly, March 1906 to January 1912, by the Frank A Munsey Corporation; edited by Perley Poore Sheehan. The Scrap Book was published in two separate sections from July 1907, the first containing articles, the second fiction. The second section became The Cavalier from September 1908, the first continuing as The Scrap Book, with some fiction content, ...
Brunt, Captain Samuel
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? - ) of A Voyage to Cacklogallinia; with a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of that Country (1727); the facsimile edition of this rare text (1940), with an introduction by Marjorie Nicolson, is useful; the novel itself, best understood as a Satire on British politics, commerce and culture, takes Captain ...
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 ...