SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 July 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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard

Schwahn, John George

(? -? ) US author of The Tableau; Or, Heaven as a Republic (1892), a Utopia governed by a strict adherence to reason. [JC]

(1944- ) US author of Young Adult novels, those of specific sf interest being her City of Ember sequence – The City of Ember (2003), The People of Sparks (2004) and The Prophet of Yonwood (2006), all three assembled as The Books of Ember (omni 2008), plus The Diamond of Darkhold (2008) – set in a Ruined Earth two ...

Fowler, Tom

(? - ) Scottish playwright in whose fourth play, Hope Has a Happy Meal (performed 2023; 2023), the eponymous Hope, after decades away, returns Mysterious-Stranger-like to her native land, the People's Republic of Kola Kola, which has been transformed into a tyrannical Dystopia run by international corporations and suffering very severely the effects of ...

Anderson, Gerry

(1929-2012) UK television producer and author, born Gerald Alexander Abrahams, who worked closely with his wife Sylvia Anderson from their marriage in 1960 to their separation in 1975; he was also an animator and she a voice artist. They will forever be remembered for a succession of 1960s children's puppet adventure shows on television that occasionally dealt with sf themes on a far more extensive scale than contemporary adult programming. Gerry Anderson's ...

Banks, Raymond E

(1918-1996) US businessman who began writing with the fantasy story "The Sad Room" in Esquire for November 1946, billed as that Slick magazine's "discovery of the month"; he began again with "Never Trust an Intellectual" in Dynamic Science Fiction for June 1953, publishing at least 30 additional stories in the next decade. His novels are Sex-dominated ...

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 ...