SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 May 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 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
Comets
Small, normally icy bodies of our solar system whose appearance during close approach to the Sun can be spectacular owing to heating and outgassing effects producing the coma (a visible local atmosphere surrounding the central nucleus) and long tail of dust and gas blown outward from the sun by the Solar Wind. Owing to this visibility and the regular return of short-period comets – whose home is in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit ...
Object Z
UK tv series (1965). Associated-Rediffusion Television. Produced and directed by Daphne Shadwell. Written by Chris McMaster. Cast includes William Abney, Celia Bannerman, Trevor Bannister, Brandon Brady, Margaret Neale, Ralph Nossek, Denys Peek and Julian Somers. Six 24-minute episodes. Black and white. / Professor Ramsay (Nossek) and other Scientists report that a meteoroid with a diameter of six or more miles is on collision course with Earth, ...
OA, The
US online tv series (2016-current). Plan B Entertainment and Anonymous Content for Netflix. Created by Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling. Directed by Zal Batmanglij. Written by Zal Batmanglij, Brit Marling, Melanie Marnich, Dominic Orlando and Ruby Rae Spiegel. Cast includes Hiam Abbass, Riz Ahmed, Ian Alexander, Will Brill, Emory Cohen, Patrick Gibson, Jason Isaacs, Alice Krige, Brit Marling, Brendan Meyer, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Brandon Perea, Phyllis Smith, Zoey Todorovsky, Paz Vega and ...
Bynner, Edwin Lassetter
(1842-1893) US historical author whose The Chase of the Meteor and Other Stories (coll 1891) presents for a young audience various fantastical tales, most notably the Flatland story "A Cruise in a Soap Bubble", which takes off from Edwin A Abbott's Flatland (1884). [JC]
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 ...