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Wednesday 9 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
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Toys
This entry deals with sf-based toys; for discussion of fictional toys, see Toys in SF. / From a commercial point of view, sf toys used to be traditionally more important than sf Games, and they have at least as long a history. They continue to be of greater commercial significance than Role Playing Games, WarGames or Gamebooks, but were ...
Samatar, Sofia
(1971- ) US academic and author whose Olondra sequence beginning with A Stranger in Olondria (2013) is a richly and densely imagined fantasy, set mostly in the eponymous empire. The protagonist's irruption into complex world as a trader (see Mysterious Stranger) becomes deep immersion in experiences half veridical, half Memory. This novel won a ...
Powys, John Cowper
(1872-1963) UK author, resident for much of his career in the USA, though he returned to Wales in the 1930s, active from around 1896 until a year or so before his death; the first half century of his career as a novelist was mostly devoted to tales in which civilization, out of touch with the mythopoeic nature of reality, conspicuously lacks an understanding of the primacy of Sex in true Religion. They are of some interest where they enter ...
Chmielewski, Tom
(1952-2022) US journalist and author, a 1984 Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop graduate. His first novel was Lunar Dust, Martian Sands (2014), a noir sf thriller set in a future of routine interplanetary Space Flight in the early twenty-second century, with human colonies now established on the Moon and Mars (see ...
Elliott, John
(1759-1834) UK author, imputed author (though he seems young for the task) of The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman ... (1778) as by Hildebrand Bowman, a Fantastic Voyage into various remote parts of the South Pacific, including Islands and Utopias, some in nether New Zealand; see Checklist for full title, which is thorough. It has been suggested in the magazine ...
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 ...