SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 6 December 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.
Site updated on 1 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Kashiwaba Sachiko
(1953- ) Japanese author, largely of fantasy fiction for children and Young Adults, beginning with Kiri no Mukō no Fushigi-na Machi (1975; trans Christopher Holmes as The Marvelous Village Veiled in Mist 1987), in which the titular Brigadoon-like Polder [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], where local ...
Quatermass Xperiment, The
Film (1955; vt The Creeping Unknown US). Hammer. Directed by Val Guest. Written by Richard Landau, Val Guest, based on the BBC TV serial by Nigel Kneale. Cast includes Brian Donlevy (Quatermass), Jack Warner and Richard Wordsworth. 82 minutes, cut to 78 minutes. Black and white. / It was this film version of the BBC's television serial The Quatermass Experiment that convinced the Hammer ...
Corcoran, Travis J I
(1971- ) US author of the self-published Aristillus sequence of sometimes didactically Libertarian SF novels beginning with The Powers of the Earth (2017). This first volume both acknowledges the inspiration of Robert A Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (December 1965-April 1966 If; 1966) and engages with many of its tropes (including ...
Gresswell, Elise Kay
Working name of Elizabeth Gresswell (1877-1944), née Kay, UK author whose Near Future Scientific Romance, When Yvonne Was Dictator (1935), concerns the election of the eighteen-year-old Yvonne initially as prime minister of the UK at a time of Economic disaster, and then, because of the power of her personality, as dictator (see Politics). In ...
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 ...