SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 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 16 February 2026
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Kauffer, E McKnight
(1890-1954) US artist and illustrator, born Edward Kauffer, active from around 1910; in 1912 he added McKnight as his middle name to honour a sponsor of his work (it is not determined if he ever legalized this change). Kauffer lived in the UK from before World War One to July 1940, when World War Two forced him to return home; the first of his circa 240 dustjackets – for D H Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! (coll 1917) – ...
McArthur, Maxine
(1962- ) Australian author who began publishing sf with the first volume of her Commander Halley sequence, Time Future (1999), which won the 1999 George Turner Award. It is an effective contribution to the growing array of sf novels in which the ambivalent history of colonialism on Earth is not transferred into narratives of Colonization of Other Worlds – a swerve typical of sf written from a ...
Frith, R J
(? - ) UK author whose sf novel, The Nemesis List (2010), is set in a relaxed Space Opera universe full of merchant traders and complaisant planetary authorities; her protagonist, a freelance freighter captain, must transfer a multiple murderer, whose IQ has been experimentally enhanced by the scientists he has murdered, to a planet where he can be taken care of (see ...
Foster, M A
(1939-2020) US author, former data-systems analyst and sequentially a Russian linguist and ICBM launch-crew commander to the US Air Force; he was also a semiprofessional photographer. After some poetry, released privately as Shards from Byzantium (coll 1969 chap) and The Vaseline Dreams of Hundifer Jones (coll 1970 chap), he began to publish sf with the ambitious Ler trilogy about a race of Supermen created by ...
Yano Ryūkei
Pen-name of Fumio Yano (1851-1931), a Japanese journalist, author and publisher regarded as one of the fathers of the genre in his native country. An early adopter of Western learning in the swiftly modernizing Japan, Yano studied English and Western law at Keiō Gijuku (later Keiō University). Following his graduation in 1873, he remained there as a teacher. In 1876, he became a journalist for the daily newspaper Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun ["Postal ...
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 ...