SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 28 March 2023
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 27 March 2023
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
Carriger, Gail
Pseudonym of US archaeologist and author Tofa Borregaard (1976- ), who published some early short fiction under her real name, beginning with "A Kind of Malice" in Space and Time for 1999. As Carriger, she has focused almost exclusively on the Parasol Protectorate sequence – the central volumes of which are Soulless (2009), Changeless (2010), Blameless (2010), Heartless ...
Computers
The computer revolution transformed the real world so rapidly that sf had to struggle hard to keep up with actual developments. Although Charles Babbage's attempts to develop a mechanical computer have lately attracted attention in such Steampunk novels as The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, they failed to inspire ...
Shapiro, Neil
(1949- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Now No One Waits" in If for December 1969, and who was moderately active for the next decade, releasing several stories and two novels: Planet Without a Name (1976), in which the exploitation of an apparently empty planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) is affected by First Contact ...
Cowie, Donald
(1911-2006) UK author (blind since 1984), in New Zealand from 1928, in UK from 1934, resident in Switzerland from 1964, who has also written as Aldwyn Abberley, Julian Mountain, R F St B Pytchely and Rufus Stone; he was the author of several crabbed Future History visions of a century in decay. Prose & Verse (coll 1945) as with Julian Mountain contains some fantasy stories; of sf interest 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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...