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Saturday 17 October 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.
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Daud, David
Pseudonym of UK author David Alexander Pennington (1954- ), whose Space Opera The Pulse of Eternity (1991) was billed as the first volume of the Starmaker series; further instalments did not follow. [DRL/SH]
Burdekin, Katharine
(1896-1963) UK author, who was working in a military hospital during World War One when her husband was wounded in action; she signed some of her work Kay Burdekin in America and, in the 1930s, wrote what remains her best-known novel as by Murray Constantine, a pseudonym which was confirmed only in 1985 by Professor Daphne Patai. Neither of her first two novels explores the fantastic. Her third, The Burning Ring (1927), however, is a ...
Cybernetic Grandma, The
Czechoslovakian animated stop-motion film (1962; original title Kybernetická babička). Louthovy Film Praha. Studia Kreslencho a Loutkoveho Filmu. Directed and written by Jiří Trnka. 28 minutes. Colour. / In the future a young girl is staying with her grandma in the country, when a flying device delivers a telegram which is played like a vinyl record (see Communications). It is from her father, saying she can now ...
Poisons
Assorted deadly substances form a subset of sf Drugs but often contain little intrinsic science-fictional interest: for example, "barbitide" in Samuel R Delany's Captives of the Flame (1963 dos; rev vt Out of the Dead City 1968) has effects resembling those of conventional arsenic, while the fast-acting "Divban rabbit-venom" mentioned in Roger Zelazny's ...
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 ...