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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.
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Friedberg, Gertrude
(1908-1989) US author who also taught. Her career as a playwright began early, with Three Cornered Moon (1933), which was later filmed, but she began publishing sf only in April 1963, with "The Short and Happy Death of George Frumkin" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her fine sf novel The Revolving Boy (1966) strikingly tells the story of a child sensitive from his unique birth in free fall to signals, possibly ...
Fisk, Nicholas
Pseudonym of UK musician, illustrator, publisher and author David Lee Higginbottom (1923-2016), who wrote exclusively for children, reportedly beginning to publish short stories before World War Two (none has been identified). After some nonfiction, his first sf tale was Space Hostages (1967), in which his tastes for Hard-SF backgrounds and realistically conceived protagonists were competently expressed in a tale whose young protagonists must learn how ...
Black Gate
US Small Press Fantasy magazine that began as a Semiprozine but now pays professional rates. It is published by New Epoch Press, St Charles, Illinois on a bi-annual basis and edited by John O'Neill. It was printed in standard size in emulation of the Pulp magazines, though is not pulp itself being printed on quality lightly ...
Fessenden, Laura Dayton
(1851-1924) US author of romances and other works, among which a tale for younger children, Moon Children (1902), is of modest interest for its depiction of an inhabited Moon, though the story soon turns on figures from Mother Goose. Of much greater interest is "2002": Childlife One Hundred Years from Now (1902), which describes inventively, for children, a Utopia containing a wide range of innovations in ...
de Pereyra, Diómedes
(1897-1976) Bolivian author, resident for much of his life in the USA, author of The Land of the Golden Scarabs (stories January, February-March and July-September 1928 The Golden Book Magazine as by D de Pereyra; fixup 1928). This is a Lost World novel set in Amazonian Brazil and Bolivia, where a surviving Incan civilization is discovered. The king's sister – her name, Ima-Sumac, "how beautiful" in Chequa, ...
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 ...