SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
McCarry, Charles
(1930-2019) US government agent and author, best known for the Paul Christopher series of intermittently Near Future political thrillers beginning with The Miernik Dossier (1973). McCarry's grave acuity, and his extensive knowledge of the workings of intelligence agencies like the CIA (his employer for a decade or more), have given rise to comparisons with the work of John Le Carré (1931-2020), though he did not share the ...
Voyage dans la Lune, Le
Film (1902; vt A Trip to the Moon). Star-Film. Directed and written by Georges Méliès, from novels cited below. Cast includes Henri Delannoy, François Lallement, Jules-Eugène Legris, Georges Méliès. 21 minutes. Tinted. / This is the first sf film (apart from short subjects lasting only 1-2 minutes). French Cinema pioneer Méliès based his amusing spectacle ...
Eason, K
(? - ) US teacher and author, most of whose early work has been fantasy, beginning with her first publication of genre interest, "Little Red" in Cabinet de Fées (anth 1992) edited by Helen Pilinovsky and Erzebet YellowBoy. Her first series, the On the Bones of Gods sequence beginning with Enemy (2016), is fantasy. Her second, the Thorne Chronicles sequence beginning with ...
Howard, Keble
Pseudonym of UK author John Keble Bell (1875-1928), whose novel of genre interest, The Peculiar Major: An Almost Incredible Story (1919), hovers Equipoisally between fantasy and sf, as its subtitle hints. The Invisibility which allows a British army officer to perform heroic exploits in World War One – while clearly influenced by H G Wells's ...
MacDonald, John D
(1916-1986) US author and ex-lieutenant colonel in the US Army, known mainly for such well-written thrillers as The Brass Cupcake (1950) and the twenty-one Travis McGee novels (1964-1985), which quickly evolved from seemingly escapist tales of derring-do, with strong hints of Ecological despair about the fate of Florida, into impassioned and savagely explicit laments for that state, for the planet, and for the human race; the nonfiction ...
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 ...