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Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Pares, Bip
Working name of UK illustrator Ethel Pares (1904-1977); the "Bip" came from her childhood attempt to pronounce the name of a family horse. From 1928 for some years, she executed posters for London Transport; most of her circa 600 dustjackets were done before World War Two, often for works of genre interest: much of this work continues to await discovery. Some of her best designs appeared on the covers of sf novels, such as E Phillips Oppenheim's ...
Traver, N K
(circa 1986- ) US author of Duplicity (2015), a Young Adult tale set in a Near Future America very similar to the contemporary world, but where seemingly covert access to Cyberspace – or perhaps a Virtual Reality constructed to resemble cyberspace – distressingly exposes the moderately dysfunctional young ...
Hamit, Francis
(1944- ) US screenwriter, journalist, playwright and author, in the U S Army Security Agency in the 1960s, multiply active from the middle of that decade. Several nonfantastic novels precede his first sf novel, Starmen (2024), which examines the artefactual nature of the American West as mythologized in the Western. Under the command of a mysterious woman, a giant Balloon carrying British ...
Cameron, Lou
(1924-2010) US illustrator and author, active in the 1950s and 1960s in such Comic books as Astonishing, Baffling Mysteries, The Beyond, Classics Illustrated, Forbidden Worlds, Web of Mystery and ...
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 ...