SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Easson, Robert
(1941- ) UK author living in the USA; his slim and eccentric sf story collection is The Bird; The Ghoul; and, In the Name of My Friend (coll 1968 chap). [JC/DRL]
Xiang Kairan
(1889-1957) Chinese author of several influential novels and essays, some as by Pingjiang Buxiaosheng, which dragged the genre of Wuxia out of the dreamtime of the nineteenth century, and towards a more modern form with nationalist and patriotic leanings. Dubbed "the father of martial arts fiction" by the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (2016), Xiang was enmeshed in the radical movement to create a new and modern ...
Marvel Super Heroes, The
Animated tv series (1966-1967). Grantray-Lawrence Animation/Krantz Films/Marvel Enterprises. Produced by Steve Krantz and Robert L Lawrence. Syndicated. Directors included Shamus Culhane, Chuck Harrison, Sid Marcus, Jerry Siegel, and Kay Wright. Writers included Jim Carmichael, Don Christensen, Stan Lee, June Patterson, and Jewell Schubel. Based on characters created by Bill Everett, Don Heck, Larry Leiber, Lee, John Romita ...
Edwards, Janet
(1958- ) UK author whose Young Adult Jarra sequence, comprising to date Earth Girl (2012), Earth Star (2013) and Earth Flight (2014), begins in the twenty-eighth-century ruins of New York, where the young orphan protagonist – stigmatized as a "Neanderthal" (see Apes as Human) amongst her ...
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 ...