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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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Whitham, John W
(1868-1952) US author of Interworld (1932), a tale set in a not clearly delineated Near Future where Homo sapiens remain backward on the home planet, but other civilizations flourish on Mars, which boasts high Technology and universal peace, and elsewhere. [JC]
Baker, Henry
(1698-1774) Naturalist and early microscopist, one of the founders of the Society of Arts in 1754; the father-in-law of Daniel Defoe. He was the author of an epic poem, The Universe (1727), the subtitle of which proclaims its intended aim "to restrain the pride of Man". This is something Baker attempts by striving repeatedly for what we might call a Sense of Wonder ("Amazing Thought! What Mortal can conceive!") ...
Mercury
Mercury is the planet nearest the Sun, and hence is difficult to observe. Until the late nineteenth century it was believed to rotate on its axis every 24 hours or so, but this opinion was displaced by that of Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) and Percival Lowell, who contended that it kept the same face permanently towards the Sun. Twentieth-century sf writers thus pictured it as having an extremely hot "dayside", a cold "nightside" ...
Fisher, Steve
Working name of US naval officer and author Steven Gould Fisher (1912-1980) who also wrote as by Grant Lane; he wrote fairly widely for the Pulp magazines, including several stories for Doc Savage beginning with "Flame in the Wind" (February 1937 Doc Savage). Destroyer (1941) is a Future War tale, published just prior to the American entry into ...
Foley, Tim
(? - ) UK playwright whose second produced play, Astronauts of Hartlepool (performed 2017), is a gonzo Satire on Brexit Britain set in Hartlepool, which is visited by disbelieving astronauts from the Multiverse. In Electric Rosary (2020; performed 2022), a "Robot" – properly an Android – brought into 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 ...