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Thursday 15 May 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.
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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Bowman, W E
(1911-1985) UK draughtsman, civil engineer and author whose best-known work is The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), a Parody of British mountaineering expedition reports which quickly gained a cult following. An utterly inept team led by the pompous, Pooteresque "Binder" (his codename in walkie-talkie communications), and including an easily distracted Scientist, ascends or rather fails to ascend the titular mountain. The ...
Keegan, Mel
Pseudonym of an unidentified author (? - ) resident in South Australia, whose fiction as Keegan has normally been written explicitly for gay markets; his sf includes the NARC sequence beginning with NARC 1: Death's Head (1991) and ending with NARC 5: Aphelion (2007), Space Operas featuring two gay paramilitaries in the Narcotics and Riot Control whose minds are ...
Venus
Because Earth's inner neighbour presented a bright and featureless face to early astronomers, it became something of a mystery planet. Nineteenth-century astronomers and early-twentieth-century sf writers generally imagined that, as the featureless face was a permanent cloud layer, the surface beneath must be warm and wet; the Venus of the imagination became a planet of vast oceans (perhaps with no land at all) or sweltering jungles. In the 1960s, however, probes revealed that Venus has no ...
Captain Rocket
US Comic (1951). One issue. P L Publishing Co, Inc. Artists unknown. / Captain Rocket "with his vast storehouse of scientific and technical knowledge, is the last hope of Earth's governing councils when things go wrong." In "The Graveyard of the Rocketeers" a paralysed navigator is the only survivor of the latest stolen space-cruiser, but Captain Rocket's mind reading device and thought projection screen enables the navigator to show his winning a ...
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 ...