SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 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 14 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Karlins, Marvin
(1941- ) US academic and author, usually of nonfiction relating to his professional work as a Professor of Management. His first book is sf, The Last Man Is Out (1969; vt The New Atoms' Bombshell 1980 as by Robert Browne), a Near Future tale in which a bored scientist uses Computers and other devices to maximize outcomes for the Baseball team he has ...
Buffini, Moira
(1965- ) UK dramatist, screenwriter, actor, director and author, active from the late 1980s, best known for her plays, in several of which rambunctious anachronisms may represent an insertion of a perhaps somewhat stagey Fantastika into nonfantastic works. An early example is Silence (performed 1999; 1999 chap), in which complications attending the end of the first millennium CE are intensified by second-millennium shout-outs. ...
Oldmeadow, Ernest
(1867-1949) UK author whose 1930s Radio work sometimes verged on the fantastic, though the examples supplied in The Town To-Morrow: Five and Twenty Imaginary Broadcasts (coll 1937) as by Francis Downman do not seem to have been broadcast. His sf novel, The North Sea Bubble: A Fantasia (1906), set in 1910 after a German Invasion of England on Battle of Dorking lines, spoofs ...
White, Ared
(1880-1941) US military officer and author, one of the organizers of the American Legion in 1919; Camp White in Oregon was named for him. Of his numerous stories and four novels, two books are sf. Attack on America (1939) describes a weakened, unprepared USA of the very Near Future attacked through Mexico by an international coalition dominated by Germany; as with its model, George Chesney's ...
Buck Rogers XXVC
Role Playing Game (1990). Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Designed by Mike Cook, Michael Dobson, Jeff Grubb, Jim Ward, Warren Spector, Jeff Butler. / Buck Rogers was perhaps the first in the line of quintessentially American mass market Space Opera heroes which continued through Flash Gordon, E E Smith's ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...