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
Waterhouse, Elizabeth
(1834-1918) UK author whose acknowledged works consist mostly of religious studies and tracts written from a Quaker standpoint. The Brotherhood of Rest (1886 chap) as E W describes a retreat, somewhere in Britain, conceived as a Utopia. Her outright sf novel, The Island of Anarchy: A Fragment of History in the 20th Century (1887), is told as a Future History, detailing an extremely doctrinaire ...
McAllister, Don
(1934- ) US author of Cloud World (1986), an sf novel set on an inhabited Jupiter and three of its moons. [JC]
Hopkinson, Nalo
(1960- ) Jamaican-born author, in Canada from circa 1976, who began publishing work of genre interest with "A Habit of Waste" for Fireweed in 1996; this was assembled with other short work as Skin Folk (coll 2001), which was followed by Falling in Love with Hominids (coll 2015). Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), established her almost instantly as an author, winning a ...
Short Circuit
Film (1986). Turman-Foster/Tri-Star. Directed by John Badham. Written by S S Wilson, Brent Maddock. Cast includes Steve Guttenberg, Brian McNamara, Ally Sheedy and Fisher Stevens. 98 minutes. Colour. / Military Robot Number Five, a prototype killing machine, is struck by lightning which endows it with sentience. It escapes from evil Nova Robotics, finding refuge with nice animal-lover Stephanie (Sheedy), who assumes it to be ...
Kalfař, Jaroslav
(1988- ) Czech-born author, in USA from the age of fifteen. His first novel, Spaceman of Bohemia (2017), initially depicts an abstractly conceived journey through the inner Solar System, narrated with an indifferent hauteur as to any literal understanding of the SF Megatext typical of the Mainstream Writer of SF; but in this case savingly aerated by ...
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 ...