SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 5 October 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 5 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Tesla, Nikola
(1856-1943) Croatian-born (though of Serbian origin) inventor, engineer and futurist, in the US from 1884, where he was immediately hired by Thomas Alva Edison for the Edison Machine Works. The association with Edison would benefit and plague both men for the rest of their lives: Edison the pragmatic (and sometimes unscrupulous) inventor as entrepreneur; Tesla the visionary (and sometimes nearly demented) inventor as ...
Bilderdijk, Willem
(1756-1831) Dutch poet, dramatist, and author of nonfiction on many subjects. His one work of fiction was the novella Kort verhaal van eene aanmerklijke luchtreis, en nieuwe planeetontdekking (1813 chap anon; trans Paul Vincent as A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and Discovery of a New Planet 1987 chap), in which a Balloonist is cast away on a small satellite orbiting within the Earth's atmosphere. Its flora and fauna are ...
Poltergeists
These imagined Supernatural Creatures, whose German name means "noisy ghost", have attracted some sporadic sf interest. Though never directly seen, poltergeists supposedly move or throw small articles around, break crockery (which is sometimes also hurled across a room while remaining miraculously unbroken) and so forth. Their reality was once enough of an accepted phenomenon that Edmund Crispin used a highly active ...
Tomorrow: Speculative Fiction
US letter-size Semiprozine, published by Pulphouse Publishing, Eugene, Oregon for the first issue, dated January 1993 (launched in September 1992) but thereafter acquired by the editor, Algis Budrys, who published it under the Unifont Company, Evanston, Illinois for the rest of its run which was, as a print magazine, until February 1997, a total of 24 issues. It then went online from April 1997 until August 1999, a further ...
Bacon, Paul
(1923-2015) US graphic artist active from the 1940s until about a year before his death, and responsible for an estimated 6500 book-cover designs (plus some 200 for jazz LPs). Inevitably, with such a huge total of covers, quite a number were for sf authors, well over seventy of them, some of whom published several books with his covers; his first in the genre is probably that for Gunner Cade (1952) by Cyril Judd. He became known for the "Big Book ...
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 ...