SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 13 July 2025
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.
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History of SF
Sf is an impure genre (see Definitions of SF) which did not finally take shape until the late nineteenth century, although all its separate elements existed earlier. If the labelling of any earlier story as sf depended only on the presence of sf elements there would be many such. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, has a Fantastic Voyage and a great world-flood (see ...
Jacobs, Paul Samuel
(? - ) US author whose first novel, Born into Light (1988), intriguingly combines the topos of the Feral Child and that of the Superman (see also Superheroes and the character Superman): a frail naked child tumbles from interstellar space into the home of an Earth couple, who find that he learns with unnatural speed; he and his siblings may ...
Communications
Many aspects of communication in sf are dealt with under separate entries in this volume. The most familiar form of communication is through language, for a discussion of which see Linguistics. For the perennially popular theme of opening communications with unfamiliar aliens, see First Contact; for initially discovering their existence, see SETI. Direct mental communication is discussed under ...
From Beyond
Film (1986). Taryn/Empire. Executive producer Charles Band. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Dennis Paoli, loosely based on "From Beyond" (June 1934 The Fantasy Fan) by H P Lovecraft. Cast includes Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon and Ted Sorel. 85 minutes. Colour. / With three of the same leading players, the same production team, and ...
Kreighbaum, Mark
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Field of Honor" for Midnight Zoo vol 2 #3 in 1992; in his Planetary Romance sequence The Pinch – comprising Palace: A Novel of the Pinch (1996) with Katharine Kerr and The Eyes of God: A Novel of the Pinch (1998) – the planet known as Palace is the focus of ...
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 ...