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Saturday 13 December 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Robin, Emery
(? - ) US paralegal and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Ambient and Isolated Effects of Fine Particulate Matter" in Reckoning for 30 December 2019. The Empire Without End sequence beginning with The Stars Undying (2022) is a Space Opera set traditionally in a venue inspired by the Roman Empire, where dynastic intrigues may be expected in the galaxy, and frontier ...
Wells, Catherine [2]
(1872-1927) UK author, married to H G Wells from 1895 until her death. Her fiction was occasional, usually fantasy or supernatural; what seems to be a sophisticated indifference to generic boundaries (see Equipoise) marks her short work, as assembled in The Book of Catherine Wells (coll 1928), edited by H G Wells. An awareness of this insouciance is certainly essential to any reading of her ...
Bellotto, Sam, Jr
(1946-2023) US editor, author, journalist and crossword compiler who is remembered for the Amateur Magazine (foreshadowing Semiprozines) Perihelion, which launched in April 1967 as Seldon Seen edited with Eric M Jones for the science-fiction club at Long Island University in Brooklyn; from the third issue it was retitled Perihelion with continued numbering and Bellotto as sole editor; this first run ended ...
Ingersoll, Ernest
(1852-1946) US naturalist, journalist – his column, The Natural History Club, appeared weekly from 1900 to 1938 – and author of much nonfiction, plus An Island in the Air: A Story of Singular Adventures in the Mesa Country (1905) a Lost World tale, the Island in question being an enclave hidden on the flat top of a mesa. [JC]
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 ...