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Monday 23 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Silverstein, Janna
(1962- ) US editor, critic and author, in the latter capacity initially of fantasy stories beginning with "Her Mother's Cries" in Ghosttide (anth 1993) edited by Claudia O'Keefe; more recently she has written at least one Hard SF tale, "After This Life" (2008 Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show). With Tom Dupree and ...
Mahr, Kurt
Pseudonym of German physicist and author Klaus Mahn (1934-1993), mostly resident in the US from 1962; he began to publish (yet untranslated) sf tales as early as 1959, but remains best known as a principal writer from 1961 until his death for the vast Space Opera series and subseries published under the Perry Rhodan rubric, his contributions showing a bent toward Hard SF, specifically ...
McDermott, Shannon
(? - ) US author who identifies as Christian (see Religion); her first novel, The Last Heir (2009), which is set in a world partially described through generalized instancings from the SF Megatext, focuses on a dynastic dispute. After several fantasy novels, she returned to sf with the ongoing Eternities sequence beginning with The Time Door (2024), set on a ...
Sakaguchi Hironobu
(1962- ) Japanese Game designer and film director, inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 2000. Sakaguchi's first game was The Death Trap (1984 Square, PC88, PC98, FM7), an illustrated text Adventure in which the player must escape from a deserted island, released only in Japan. His fame rests, however, on the Console Role Playing Game ...
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 ...