SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 March 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 9 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Smith, George O
(1911-1981) US electronics engineer and author, most active and prominent in the 1940s in Astounding Science-Fiction, in which his first story, "QRM – Interplanetary", appeared in October 1942: the tale both began his sf career and initiated his most famous endeavour, the Venus Equilateral Series of stories (all in Astounding except for one late addition) about a ...
Packard, Edward
(1931- ) US author, co-developer with R A Montgomery of the Choose Your Own Adventure Gamebook sequence comprise of tales in which the reader becomes a kind of protagonist of the tale, being addressed in the second-person singular and actively determining the plot whenever cued to make a choice as to the next stage of the action. The ...
Cavendish, Margaret
(1623/1624-1673) UK playwright, poet and author, much of whose life shared the turbulence of her times, who died as Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne. At a time when books by women were mostly pseudonymous or appeared in pirated editions, she was one of the first British women to write and publish professionally under her own name. / Born Margaret Lucas, the youngest child of Royalist and Catholic landholders, she received no formal education but was a lady-in-waiting to Charles I's Queen, ...
Binder, Eando
The most famous of the joint Pseudonyms used by the US author brothers Earl Andrew Binder (1904-1966), who was born in Austria-Hungary and came to the US in 1910, and Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1975), who was the more active (and ultimately better known) of the two; after approximately 1934, when Earl became inactive as a writer, Otto continued to sign himself Eando Binder, so that some Eando Binder books – they were all published after 1940; several contain ...
Greer, Richard
Joint pseudonym of Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg used for the stories "The Great Kladnar Race" (December 1956 Amazing) and "The Secret of the Shan" (June 1957 Fantastic). According to Silverberg the earlier Greer story "Calling Captain Flint" (August 1956 Amazing Stories) is by Garrett alone. [PN/DRL] links / ...
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 ...