SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 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
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Ghosh, Amitav
(1956- ) Indian author now resident in the US, whose sf novel, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery (1992), won the Arthur C Clarke Award. Within a thriller frame, it provides a searching exploration of culture, ethics, and the possibilities of Genetics, plus a fantasticated portrait of Ronald Ross, whose 1902 ...
Swain, Dwight V
(1915-1992) US author, very variously employed in jobs ranging from migrant labourer to university lecturer to scriptwriter. His first sf story, "Henry Horn's Super-Solvent" in Fantastic Adventures for November 1941, initiated the Henry Horn series of tales about a bumblingly incompetent would-be Scientist; the others are "Henry Horn's Blitz Bomb" (June 1942 Amazing), "Henry Horn's Racing ...
Holy War
Board and counter Wargame (1979). Metagaming Concepts. Designed by Lynn Willis. / Holy War's framing narrative describes the creation of a Pocket Universe in which time passes at a greatly accelerated rate by a vast alien entity. After the construction is complete, this being realizes that life has appeared on one of the planets orbiting the handful of stars in its microverse. While the entity is considering the ...
Hensley, Joe L
(1926-2007) US Indiana Judicial Circuit Court judge 1975-1988 and author, most active as an author of suspense novels, one of which, The Poison Summer (1974), was named in the New York Times Best of the Year List in 1974. A member of First Fandom and a lifelong sf fan, he began publishing sf with "Eyes of the Double Moon" in Planet Stories for May 1953, and appeared with some frequency in the field, ...
Black Gate
US Small Press Fantasy magazine that began as a Semiprozine but now pays professional rates. It is published by New Epoch Press, St Charles, Illinois on a bi-annual basis and edited by John O'Neill. It was printed in standard size in emulation of the Pulp magazines, though is not pulp itself being printed on quality lightly ...
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 ...