SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 21 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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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. ...
Morgan, Dan
(1925-2011) UK poet, author and professional guitarist, about which instrument he wrote two successful manuals, Guitar (1965) and Spanish Guitar (1982). He began publishing sf with "Alien Analysis" for New Worlds in January 1952. His first sf novels, Cee-Tee Man (1955) and The Uninhibited (August-October 1957 New Worlds as "Uninhibited"; 1961), were routine adventures, but ...
Space Habitats
The space habitat is a natural development from the concept of the manned Space Station (which see). Inevitably there is considerable overlap, with a broad and fuzzy dividing line between space stations which are primarily seen as way-stations or scientific observation posts, and space habitats whose occupants have come to regard them as home. J D Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929 chap) proposed ...
O'Reilly, John Boyle
(1844-1890) Irish-born political agitator, journalist, poet and author; for his Fenian activities he was transported to Western Australia in 1867, but soon escaped, arriving in the US in 1869. His sf novel about a republican England, The King's Men: A Tale of Tomorrow (1884) with Robert Grant, S of Dale (a pseudonym of US lawyer and diplomat Frederic Jesup Stimson) and J T Wheelwright (1856-1925), also a New ...
Schmidt, Arno
(1914-1979) German translator and author noted for his linguistic innovation and the swift wit of his experimental fictions, which project an air of calculatedly cerebral quarrelsomeness; he repeatedly acknowledged the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he translated, and whose speculations shape and dominate his most ambitious novel, Zettels Traum ["Bottom's Dream"] (1970). The marked and extremist manipulation of ...
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 ...