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Thursday 12 March 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 9 March 2026
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Barlow, Jane
(1856-1917) Irish author, often under pseudonyms, including Antares Skorpios (technically a House Name, as her father, James William Barlow, later used that name for an sf novel) and Felix Ryark. A Strange Land (1908) as by Felix Ryark is a Lost Race tale whose protagonist, penetrating a mysterious mist in a tiny boat, comes across the land in question, which is not described ...
Osborne, Karen
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Retirement" in Aiofe's Kiss for December 2008; her Memory War sequence beginning with Architects of Memory (2020) is a Hard SF Space Opera, containing elements of Military SF. set in an interstellar environment with resemblances to traditional ...
Rocket's Blast Comicollector
US photocopied Comics Fanzine/Semiprozine published on good-quality paper. Published by the Science Fiction and Comics Fan Association. Editors included G B Love and James Van Hise. 125 issues for 1964 to 1983, numbered #29-#153. Publication was monthly to 1978; thereafter nominally bimonthly but increasingly erratic from 1979. / This began with the 1962 merger of two Fanzines ...
Fitch, Thomas
(1838-1923) US politician, apparently inconspicuous, lawyer, newspaper editor, and author of Better Days; Or, a Millionaire of To-Morrow (1891) with his wife Anna M Fitch; it is a Utopia told from a conservative point of view. [JC]
Suzuki Izumi
(1949-1986) Japanese author who, at the beginning of her troubled career, quit her teenage job as a key-punch operator after a Fanzine story gained an honourable mention in a competition run by the literary magazine Shōsetsu Gendai. Moving to Tokyo in 1970, she moonlighted as a bar hostess, nude model and actress under the name Naomi Asaka or Naomi Senkō. Her husband, the saxophonist Kaoru Abe, died of a drug overdose in ...
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 ...