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Tuesday 10 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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Stunner
Traditional item of sf Terminology, third in the trio of classic Genre SF hand Weapons: the others are the Blaster and the sometimes synonymous Disintegrator. The Star Trek phaser can famously be set to "stun", but the device was already old in sf. Personal "electric stunners" appear in C M ...
Kingston, Agnes Kinloch
(1824-1913) UK linguist and translator, married from 1853 until his death to W H G Kingston, who published her translations of Jules Verne and Johann Wyss under his own name without acknowledgement; for some later work she signed herself Agnes D Kingston. These translations, which have been properly faulted for expurgations and inaccuracies, were typical of Victorian workmanship in this ...
Hawksley, Humphrey
(1964- ) UK journalist and author, very well known for his work as a foreign correspondent in the Far East; his novels constantly press into sf readings after the pattern of most Technothrillers set in the very Near Future, though it is certainly the case that tales like his first, Dragonstrike: The Millennium War (1997) with Simon Holberton, and his fourth, Dragonfire (2000), ...
Buckell, Tobias S
(1979- ) Grenada-born author, in the US from adulthood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Fish Merchant" in Science Fiction Age for March 2000, and who has been moderately prolific as short fiction writer, much of this work being assembled as Tides from the New Worlds (coll 2009) and Nascence: 17 Failed Stories and What They Taught Me (coll 2012). He began publishing novels with the ...
Buchholz, Jason
(circa 1975- ) US editor, artist and author, whose Hapa background – a term used in California to designate persons whose ethnic background includes an Asian or Pacific Islander strain – infuses his first novel, A Paper Son (2016), set primarily in very Near Future San Francisco (see California) after a month-long storm has inundated the city (see ...
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 ...