SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 13 January 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 12 January 2026
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
von Däniken, Erich
(1935-2026) Swiss author of a series of purportedly nonfiction books, beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968; trans Michael Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969), which, based on a mass of often suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was visited by at least one Alien spacefaring race before and at the dawn of historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid of ...
Murphy, Brian
(1973- ) US editor (in healthcare publishing) and enthusiast of Robert E Howard's Conan character, of J R R Tolkien, and of Heroic Fantasy in general; active in various Fanzines and online venues since 2007. An early print appearance was the essay "The Unnatural City" in The Cimmerian for April 2008. He has published a ...
Yexley, Lionel
(1861-1933) UK naval officer, journalist, editor, politician and author born James Wood, taking the name Yexley by deed poll in 1918; active from about 1890, at first anonymously, then as Yexley. He remains best known for his campaigns to improve conditions among seamen, which proved successful from around 1911 after he persuaded Admiral Sir John Fisher (1841-1920) and Winston Churchill that reforms would improve the efficiency of the service. His ...
England, George Allan
(1877-1936) US explorer, translator and author of much magazine fiction between 1901 and 1935; of more than 330 published stories so far traced, five were full-length sf novels in serial form, and many individual tales were sf, starting with his first work of genre interest, "The Time-Reflector" in The Monthly Story Magazine for September 1905, about the Invention of a Time Viewer device. His work appeared predominantly in ...
Orbit Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine, published by Hanro Corp, New York; edited by Jules Saltman. Five issues [Fall] 1953 to November/December 1954, the first two undated. All stories were chosen by Donald A Wollheim, uncredited. Orbit Science Fiction was a middling-quality magazine that fell victim to the inundation of the market with too many sf magazines in the early 1950s. A story in the Tex Harrigan series by August ...
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 ...