SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 25 September 2022
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 23 September 2022
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Clifton, Mark
(1906-1963) US author, an industrial psychologist for many years until his retirement around 1950 – mostly occupied in personnel work, putting together many thousands of case histories from which he extrapolated conclusions after the fashion of Kinsey and Sheldon. This practical experience, and the slant of mind it fuelled, mark his work as a writer, beginning with his first stories of genre interest, "What Have I Done?" for Astounding in May 1952, and the slightly later "Star, Bright" ...
Llewellyn, Robert
(1956- ) UK actor, comedian and author, perhaps best known for his role from 1989 to 2012 as the Android Kryten in the Television series Red Dwarf, for which he also wrote some scripts. He first came to notice within an sf context, however, with his play "Mammon, Robot Born of Woman" (performed Summer 1988, Edinburgh Festival), about a Robot whose behaviour deteriorates as he learns more successfully how to behave like a human. Most of his fiction focuses on comic ...
Cassandra
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Channel Tunnel; or, England's Ruin (1876 chap), a Future War tale in which nobody believes that the eponymous passageway will invite a ruthless Invasion of the sceptr'd isle. [JC]
Thurber, James
(1894-1961) US cartoonist, playwright and author, best known for his cartoons (many of them published in The New Yorker [see Slick], where many of his writings also appeared) and for his complexly humorous short stories and pieces, the best assembly of these being perhaps The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze: A Collection of Short Pieces (coll 1935), where his Alternate History spoof, "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox" (6 December 1930 The New Yorker), reached book form. His most ...
Schofield, Alfred Taylor
(1846-1929) UK medical doctor and author whose nonfiction was divided between technical medical studies and hortatory guides to Christianity; his sf tales are Thought Experiments in the nineteenth century manner, where such narratives are more likely to teach than to explore. Travels in the Interior, or The Wonderful Adventures of Luke and Belinda: Edited by a London Physician (1887) as by Luke Theophilus Courteney carries its protagonists, shrunk to a suitable size, on a didactic expedition ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...