SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Mead, Harold
(1910-1997) Indian-born author, in the UK from an early age. The first and better known of his sf novels, The Bright Phoenix (1955), is a sombrely told Ruined Earth tale in which a reestablished but over-regimented Utopian culture tries unsuccessfully to reinhabit abandoned parts of the Earth; it ends a little sentimentally with a Second Coming. The other, Mary's Country (1957), tells of the quest of a ...
Outer Limits Newsletter
US letter-size saddle-stapled photocopied Fanzine printed on low-grade paper. Editor/publisher: Steve Streeter. Eight issues, January 1978 to Autumn 1983. Publication schedule was highly erratic. / This was in effect an unofficial follow-up to The Outer Limits: An Illustrated Review (which see), largely illustrated and written by Streeter alone. The first four issues were black-and-white only; #5 ...
Schongut, Emanuel
(1936- ) American artist, sometimes credited in error as Emmanuel Schongut. He was educated at New York's Pratt Institute, where he later worked as an instructor, and has applied his skills to diverse artistic endeavours including book covers, children's books, posters, and advertisements. His genre work began in the 1960s, when he painted a number of sf book covers for Doubleday, and later for other publishers. His distinctive style, usually featuring simply drawn human ...
Aelita Award
In its heyday the most prestigious Russian sf award, founded in 1981 by the Russian Federation Writers' Union and Ural'skii sledopyt ["Urals Pathfinder"] magazine. The latter was published from the city of Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk until 1991), and this the ceremony was held there as part of the annual Aelita Convention. The winner is chosen by a panel of judges. The Aelita was instituted as an award for the best single sf work ...
Hill, Ernest
(1915-2003) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Last Generation" in New Worlds for January 1964, and who published some stories of interest, most notably the Dystopian "Atrophy" (in New Writings in SF #6, anth 1965, ed John Carnell). His novels – the rather desultory Space Opera Pity about Earth (1968 dos); ...
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 ...