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Tuesday 21 July 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 20 July 2026
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Hunter, Thomas O'D

(? - ) US author of a Post-Holocaust tale, Softly Walks the Beast (1982), in which survivors must cope with events typical of Horror in SF. [JC]

(1963- ) US composer and author – married since 2001 to Justine Larbalestier – whose first sf novel, Polymorph (1997), a tale immersed in a heatedly entangled New York, features a Shapeshifter protagonist who seems to match the city, both protagonist and venue being rendered in ways that hint of his Urban Fantasies [see The ...

SF in the Classroom

In September 1953 Sam Moskowitz began to teach what was almost certainly the first sf course in the USA to be given through a college. The course was on Science Fiction Writing, was delivered on a non-credit basis through the City College of New York, and was presented with the collaboration of a popular-science writer, Robert Frazier (not to be confused with the sf poet Robert Frazier). For the Autumn 1953 sessions, ...

Cobb, James H

(1953-2014) US author in whose Technothriller, Choosers of the Slain (1996), a stealth destroyer full of Inventions, and captained by a woman Commander perhaps supernaturally attuned to her ship, is pitted against an Argentinian attempt to claim the whole of Antarctica; further novels in the Amanda Garrett sequence hover within the same quasi-sf environment. The sf singleton Cibola (2004), set in ...

Fairman, Paul W

(1909-1977) US editor and author in several genres, including crime stories and erotica; active from around 1947. His first published sf story was "No Teeth for the Tiger" in Amazing for February 1950, and for some years thereafter he was a regular contributor to the Ziff-Davis magazines under his own name, the pseudonyms Robert Lee and Mallory Storm, and various house pseudonyms (see House Names), ...

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 ...