SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 May 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.
Site updated on 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
Corbett, Julian
(1854-1922) UK author (in his early career) who later became a naval historian (partly for reasons of social prestige). He is the author of a Lost Race tale, Kophetua the Thirteenth (1889 2vols), which describes the ancient Christian kingdom of Oneiria, a Utopia founded in Africa by an Englishman; notably, this utopia, based on a reform of Money, contains within it a ...
Vansittart, Peter
(1920-2008) UK author best known for his densely written historical novels, whose polymathic metaphoric richness brought an aesthetic seriousness and density to that form; his consistent failure to gain a wide readership, over a career that lasted more than six decades, must qualify any claim that he transformed the historical novel as a whole – though it seems certain that those who read him were deeply influenced by his example. Vansittart's first novel, however, is sf, a form he used ...
Turner, Ron
(1922-1998) UK illustrator and Comics artist who took early inspiration from the gaudy sf covers of Amazing Stories and Astounding Science-Fiction. He was illustrating for the Boys' Paper Modern Wonder as early as 1940, and went on to produce many covers for 1950-1954 sf titles by John Russell Fearn writing as Vargo Statten, Volsted ...
Simone, Nina
Working name of US singer, pianist, composer and civil rights activist Eunice Kathleen Waymon (1933-2003), widely celebrated as a writer and performer in jazz and R&B. Her one excursion into sf, "22nd Century", was recorded in 1971 but only made available in the box set The Complete RCA Album Collection (2011). It is a remarkable, near ten-minute, stream-of-consciousness depiction of a Near Future after a bloody revolution in 1988 and plague in ...
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 ...