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Friday 13 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.
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Pelham, David
(1938- ) UK illustrator, and art director of Penguin Books 1968-1980. Although his work in sf illustration necessarily took second place to his professional duties at Penguin, he designed some fine covers in that period, notably those for the 1970s Penguin editions of J G Ballard's novels and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962). He uses the airbrush effectively and his smooth, ...
Randall, John D
(1944- ) US author of an extremely late Yellow Peril tale, The Tojo Virus (1991), in which a Japanese super-corporation plans to infect America's Computers with an incapacitating virus (see Paranoia). [JC]
Wallis, Redmond
(1933- ) New Zealand author active from the early 1960s whose Young Adult Triangulum sequence comprising Starbloom (1989) and The Mills of Space (1989) faces its young protagonists with Space Opera challenges, as an Alien civilization threatens Earth with a deadly Drug. [JC]
Inner Space
In sf Terminology, an antonym to "outer space". The term was probably first used in the sf field by Robert Bloch in a speech at the 1948 Worldcon, but was not widely disseminated at that time. However, in "They Come from Inner Space" (5 December 1953 The New Statesman) – an essay he later included in Thoughts in the Wilderness (coll 1957) – J B ...
McNeil, Everett
(1862-1929) US scenario creator for silents (mostly Westerns) and author of adventure tales for boys, including two Lost Race adventures, The Lost Treasure Cave; Or, Adventures with the Cowboys of Colorado (1905), in which the Indians the cowboys must deal with are in fact Aztecs; and the more fully developed The Lost Nation (1918), set in Underground venues haunted by apemen ...
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 ...