SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 April 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 6 April 2026
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Harrison, Troon
(1958- ) Canadian author, initially of picture books for children, more recently of Young Adult novels; she is deft with horses. The Tales of Terre sequence [see Checklist] is fantasy. Of sf interest is Eye of the Wolf (2003), set in a Dystopian North America a century hence as it faces a new Ice Age, the young protagonist, whose mother has been inveigled into the warm South, experiences ...
In Flames
Swedish heavy metal band, formed in Gothenberg in 1990 by guitarist Jesper Strömblad (1972- ) and vocalist Anders Fridén (1973- ). Their third album Whoracle (1997) is a concept album about the rise of a global society on Earth, leading to a technologically advanced utopia, which is then destroyed by the inevitability of human greed and exploitation. The apocalypse is televised. In Flames have a ...
Welcome, S Byron
(1861-1948) US engineer, inventor and author of From Earth's Center: A Polar Gateway Message (1894), a Lost World tale whose protagonists descend into a Symmes-style Hollow Earth, where they discover an English-speaking country called Centralia, a Utopia where laissez-faire capitalism is luckily controlled by some mixed socialistic joint ownership ...
Bluejay Books
US publishing house founded by James R Frenkel, who had previously been the editor of Dell's sf line. Bluejay Books began publishing in 1983, its books being distributed by St Martin's Press. Among its titles were Gardner Dozois's best-of-the-year anthologies (see Anthologies), books by Frenkel's wife Joan D Vinge, Dan ...
Chambers, John
(1922-2001) US makeup artist and medical technician. Chambers first began to learn such techniques performing reconstructive surgery and designing prosthetic limbs for wounded soldiers while serving in World War Two. Chambers is of most importance to sf for his work on the Alien race the Vulcans featured on the original Star Trek (1966-1969) Television series – for which he moulded Spock's ...
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 ...