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Wednesday 20 May 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 18 May 2026
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Downing, Paula E
Working name of US attorney, municipal judge and author Paula Elaine Downing King (1951-2017), who wrote also as Paula King and under the pseudonyms P K McAllister and Diana Marcellas; she was formerly married to and divorced from T Jackson King. Downing began publishing work of genre interest with "Loni's Promise" for Discoveries in 1989. Her first novel, Mad Roy's Light (1990) as Paula King, is an sf adventure featuring a human woman who ...
Smeaton, Oliphant
(1856-1914) Scottish editor and author, in New Zealand and Australia 1878-1893, where most of this fiction was set, including a modestly fantasticated adventure, The Treasure Cave of the Blue Mountains (1898), whose central guide to the hidden horde is a young woman. Smeaton is of sf interest Lost Race tale for boys, A Mystery of the Pacific (1899), though the various protagonists of the tale are all adult: three Englishmen, searching ...
Galaxy [music]
German/Swiss prog-rock band, founded in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1977, who sang in English. The songs on their one album release, Nature's Clear Well (1978) are mostly environmental in theme, with a Dystopian vision of urban living, and the hint ("I've Come From A World") of extraterrestrial intervention. [AR]
Pratt, Cornelia Atwood
Working and maiden name of Cornelia Atwood Comer (1865-1929), author with Richard Slee (who has not been traced) of Dr Berkeley's Discovery (1899), in which the titular pathologist solves a mystery with his memory-cell-reading device (see Psychology). In an early variation on the Urban Legend that a dead person's retinas retain the last image seen, this Invention recovers latent visual ...
Kirst, Hans Hellmut
(1914-1989) German author best known for nonfantastic novels about World War Two. His Near-Future sf novel, Keiner Kommt Davon (1957; trans Richard Graves as No One Will Escape 1959; vt The Seventh Day 1959), deals with the period directly preceding World War Three and with the atomic Holocaust that then kills off the cast, ...
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 ...