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Wednesday 11 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.
Site updated on 9 February 2026
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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 ...
Dallas, Ian
(1930-2021) Scottish teacher and Sufi-based leader and advocate of a traditional though (to Western eyes) meliorist form of Islam, and author. At some early point he adopted the name Abdalqadir as-Sufi, which we take here to be a legal change. His first book, The Book of Strangers (1972) as Dallas, is of sf interest for its depiction of a Near-Future early twenty-first century high-Technology surveillance ...
Cantril, Hadley
(1906-1969) US psychologist and sociologist whose The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic: With the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast (1940), "with the assistance of" Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog, prints for the first time the script by Howard Koch for Orson Welles's 30 October 1938 Radio broadcast of H G Wells's ...
Mamatas, Nick
(1972- ) US author much of whose work has been horror or fantasy, of interest not only for his sf but for an assured and adventurous mixing of genres (see Equipoise), often couched as Satire, throughout his career to date; it is at times not easy – nor perhaps very useful – to fix particular tales into a safe generic framework, though his creative interest in H P ...
Armfield, Julia
(1990- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Mantis" in Neon for May 2018. Her first novel, Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), which hints Equipoisally at a Horror-In-Sf "explanation", follows the protagonist's slowly intensifying acquaintance with grief as her wife suffers/undergoes metamorphosis into something like the benthic creature she has encountered in a ...
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 ...