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Sunday 22 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Hawkins, Jane E
(1951-2022) US mathematician, engineer and computer programmer, long active in Fandom, where she worked on many Conventions including the 1989 Worldcon. Her one sf novel is Quantum Gate (1996), whose titular device provides the Ecologically devastated Earth of 2057 with access to a Parallel World rich in mineral resources, in ...
Robertson, Wilfrid
(1892-1973) UK author of adventure tales, many of them for younger readers; of sf interest is The Scar on the Film (1939), a Lost Race novel in which a civilization of ancient Phoenicians is discovered in Africa. [JC]
Lucian
(circa 125 CE-after 180 CE) Syrian-Greek author, known also as Lucian of Samosata; born in Samosata, capital of Commagene, in Syria (now modern Turkey). He early became an advocate and practised at Antioch, but soon set out on the travels which were to help provide the verisimilitude underlying the fantastic surface of some of his works. He visited Greece, Italy and Gaul, studied philosophy in Athens, and eventually became procurator of part of Egypt, ...
Sallis, James
(1944- ) US musician, poet and author, briefly active in New Worlds during its Michael Moorcock-directed New-Wave phase; he began to publish work of genre interest in this context, with "Kazoo" (August 1967 New Worlds). His clearly acknowledged models in the French avant garde and the gnomic brevity of much of his work limited his appeal ...
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 ...