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Friday 13 February 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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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Piranha
Film (1978). New World. Executive producers Roger Corman, Jeff Schechtman. Directed by Joe Dante. Written by John Sayles, based on a story by Sayles and Richard Robinson. Cast includes Paul Bartel, Bradford Dillman, Kevin McCarthy, Heather Menzies, Dick Miller, Barbara Steele and Keenan Wynn. 94 minutes. Colour. / The army has been creating cold-water-tolerant man-eating piranhas for use ...
Straub, Peter
(1943-2022) US author who focused throughout his long career on horror novels, most of them ambitious, and almost always fantastic (see Fantastika; Horror in SF), but using very few sf agencies at any point. His collaboration with Stephen King in the Talisman sequence comprising The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001) verges on sf, however, when its characters ...
Childers, Erskine
(1870-1922) UK advocate of Irish nationalism, military theoretician and author, who lived both in the UK and Ireland. His Future War novel, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service Recently Achieved (1903), describes an exploratory sea journey into the Frisian Islands along the German coast, where its adventurous protagonists uncover secret plans for a German Invasion of the UK using shallow-draft vessels; ...
Bair, Patrick
Pseudonym of UK author David Groom (? - ), whose Faster! Faster! (1950) is a Dystopian fable with an sf flavour in which representatives of three classes, caught on a train which goes on for ever, must work out their destinies; its abstract nature differentiates the tale from his later work, though Gargantua Falls (1951) places very similar Satirical points in an only ...
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 ...