SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 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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Starfaring
Role Playing Game (1976). Flying Buffalo. Designed by Ken St. Andre. / Starfaring was the first Role Playing Game to be set in a Space Opera universe. Its milieu includes such iconic features of the subgenre as Faster Than Light travel, intelligent Aliens, hostile Robots, ...
Holmes, F Ratcliffe
Working name of Frederick William Ratcliffe-Holmes (circa 1878-1952) UK naturalist, film-producer and author whose The Secret People: Adventure in Africa (1928) is a Lost Race tale set in Africa, where an Ancient Egyptian civilization is discovered by the Young Adult protagonists. [JC]
Vulcan
This is the usual name given to an imagined planet within the orbit of Mercury, first proposed in 1859 by Urbain De Vernier to explain irregularities in Mercury's orbit (now understood to be an effect of Einstein's Theory of Relativity). Such a planet is observed in Donald W Horner's fanciful By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and His Friends (1910), and ...
Kelly, Ken
(1946-2022) Working name of US artist Kenneth William Kelly, who also signed works as Ken W Kelly and K W Kelly (though the unusual style of the latter signature misled some into incorrectly rendering his name as C W Kelly). A self-trained artist, Kelly served in the US Marines and, after returning to New York in 1968, garnered his first assignments with the help of his friend Frank Frazetta, to whom he was related in a convoluted manner and to whose studio ...
If
US Digest-size magazine. 175 issues March 1952 to November/December 1974. It was founded by James L Quinn's Quinn Publishing Co. with Paul W Fairman as editor, but Fairman, who had been writing profusely for the Ziff-Davis Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures developed If as a copy of those magazines. Sales were poor and ...
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 ...