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Monday 13 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 13 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Datlow, Ellen
(1949- ) US editor, initially of sf, though in recent years she has concentrated more on fantasy and horror. She first became influential as fiction editor of Omni (1980-1995) and Omni Internet (1996-1998); she edited two sequences of spin-off anthologies from the magazine 1983-1994 [see Checklist below; see Omni for details]; a third sequence comprising Omni Visions One (anth 1993) and ...
Free, Colin
(1925-1996) Australian author whose The Soft Kill (1973), set in a totalitarian Near Future world in the depths of an Overpopulation crisis (an emphasis which clearly dates Free's concerns, as later in the twentieth century overpopulation became an issue more often ignored than confronted); the privileged few live in elevated Keeps. [JC]
Boye, Karin
(1900-1941) Swedish poet and author, whose first-hand experience of the fall of Weimar Germany during 1932-1934 directly influenced the work for which she is best-known by English-language readers, the Dystopia Kallocain (1940; trans Gustav Lannestock 1966), one of the several great dystopias set in a dreaded Near Future to have appeared in the decades-long aftermath of ...
Dan, Uri
(1937-2006) Israeli photographer, journalist and author, long identified as an advocate of Ariel Sharon's understanding of the Middle East nightmare; his Ultimatum: Pu 94 (1977) with Peter Mann is a Technothriller set in his home territories. [JC]
Venezuela
Venezuelan Proto SF began with the short story "La Realidad Circundante" ["The Surrounding Reality"] by Julio Garmendia, published in his first book La Tienda de Muñecos ["The Doll Store"] (coll 1927). In this story Garmendia shows us a personality-adapting machine which can scientifically adapt any personality to a continuously changing world. Eleven years later Enrique Bernardo Núñez published La Galera de Tiberio ...
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 ...