SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 18 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Mechanical Man, The
Italian film (1921). Original title L'Uomo Meccanico. Milano Film. Directed and written by André Deed. Cast includes André Deed, Valentina Frascaroli, Mathilde Lambert and Gabriel Moreau. 60-80 minutes. Black and white (but with colour tinting). About 26 minutes of this movie survive: it had long been considered lost, until parts of the Portuguese version were discovered in Brazil, albeit in poor condition. / When a criminal gang learn a ...
Gilbert, John
(1926- ) US author whose sf novel, Aiki (1986), sets a gladiatorial martial-arts tale in twenty-first-century New York. [JC]
Cave
Chicago-based instrumental group. Their compositions are structured around carefully locked-together repetitive riffs and generate considerable quasi-hypnotic intensity. Psychic Psummer (2009) opens with the deep space tour "Gamm" (the name comes from an obscure Swedish record label); and the album also includes "Encino Man", a version of the 1992 movie Encino Man about a frozen caveman who is brought back to life in modern-day California. The ...
Compton, Stoney
Working name of Leonard W Compton (? - ), US author and illustrator who began to publish work of genre interest with "Whalesong" in Universe 1 (anth 1990) edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber; another early story is "When the Ship Came" (December 1994 Tomorrow). In his ...
Amateur Magazine
A term used to distinguish between those magazines which are produced professionally (see Prozine; SF Magazines) and those that are produced for the sheer pleasure of the product without financial consideration. For the purposes of this encyclopedia, Amateur Magazines are split into Fanzines, which are produced by fans for other fans and tend to be dedicated to the discussion and review of science fiction, ...
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 ...