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Sunday 8 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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Grant, Rob
(1955-2026) UK author, initially best known under the collaborative pseudonym Grant Naylor for his work on the Red Dwarf (1988-current) Television series (which see for discussion). Only one related novel, Grant's solo Backwards (1996), has not been published under this name; as the title suggests, the central sf theme in Backwards is that of ...
Green, Joseph
(1931-2026) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" in New Worlds for February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus stories (not all sf) have ...
Simmons, Dan
(1948-2026) US elementary school teacher circa 1971-1987 and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine for April 1982, and who was for some time thought of primarily as an author of tales of Horror, some of which – along with sf and Fantasy stories – were assembled ...
Snell, Edmund
(1889-1972) UK author, prolific between the Wars, specializing in thrillers (often with Oriental villains) and mysteries. The Yu-Chi Stone (1925) is a Lost Race adventure set in Borneo; The White Owl (1930), on the other hand, involves an ancient Toltec curse which is activated from an ancient temple and causes its victims to commit terrible crimes. Snell's sf normally focuses on Mad Scientists and ...
Hauptmann, Gerhart
(1862-1946) German playwright and author, winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize for Literature, whose greatest plays were performed before the turn of the century and whose novels were written later. Some plays are fantasy: Hanneles Himmelfahrt (1893; trans William Archer as Hannele: A Dream Poem 1894 chap), Die versunkene Glocke: Ein Deutsche Märchendrama (1896; trans C H Meltzer as ...
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 ...