SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 19 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 18 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Suttner, Baroness Bertha von
(1843-1914) Austrian journalist, editor and author, famed for her pacifism, for which she became famous after the publication of her novel, Die Waffen Nieder! ["Lay Down Your Arms"] (1889). She is of sf interest for Der Menschheit Hochgedanken: Roman aus der nächsten Zukunft (1911; trans Nathan Haskell Dole as When Thoughts Will Soar: A Romance of the Immediate Future 1914), a Near Future ...
Pitt, Stanley
(1925-2002) Australian Comics artist, cartoonist and illustrator, active from around 1942, his early comics work in particular influenced by Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon; over an exceedingly prolific career he sometimes signed his name Stan Pitt, and sometimes worked as by Safone Jais. His first original work of sf interest is probably the comic strip Silver Starr in the Flameworld (24 November ...
Knapp, Florence
(? - ) UK author whose first book, the nonfiction Flossie Teacake's Guide to English Paper Piecing (2018), which analyses and gives lessons in how to weave patchwork paper images out of sometimes disparate materials, may seem in its register to deal with issues cognate with the structuring of her first novel. In The Names (2025), a mother with three choices of a name for her newborn son chooses all three, creating a ...
Invisible Avenger
Film (1958; vt The Invisible Avenger; vt Bourbon Street Shadows; vt Terror in the Night). Republic Pictures. Produced by Emanuel Demby and Eric Sayers. Directed by James Wong Howe, Ben Parker and John Sledge. Written by George Bellak and Ruth Jeffries from a story by Walter B Gibson (uncredited). Cast includes Mark Daniels, Steve Dano, Richard Derr, Dan Mullin and Helena Westcott. 60 minutes. Black and white. / Expatriate ...
Pilkington, Ace G
(1951-2019) US academic – professor of English and history at Dixie State University, St George, Utah – and sf poet and critic who began to publish work of genre interest with the poem "One Translation of Odysseus" in Amazing Stories for July 1986; several further poems appeared in later issues of this magazine and in such venues as Asimov's and Weird Tales. Pilkington's critical works are ...
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 ...