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Sunday 12 July 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.
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Johnston, William
(1924-2010) US author, journalist and disk jockey who served in the US Navy Air Corps during World War Two, whose work consists primarily though not exclusively of Ties to various media productions; he wrote more than a hundred such novelizations and original tied novels, beginning to publish work of genre interest with the well-received Get Smart! (1965) and eight further ties to the Television "spy-fi" spoof ...
Rose, Mark
(1939- ) US academic and author whose assistance in preparing Kingsley Amis's New Maps of Hell (1960) was acknowledged by its author. An apocalyptic Post-Holocaust short story, "We Would See a Sign" in Spectrum 3 (anth 1963) edited by Amis and Robert Conquest, did not lead to a fiction career, and Rose remains best known in the sf field ...
Def-Con 4
Film (1985). Salter Street International Films/New World Pictures. Produced by Michael Donovan, Paul Donovan, and Maura O'Connell. Directed by Paul Donovan and Tony Randel (uncredited). Written by Paul Donovan. Cast includes Maury Chaykin, Tim Choate, Kevin King, Kate Lynch, John Walsch and Lenore Zann. 88 minutes. Colour. / Set in the Near Future, this film features a Space Station armed with nuclear missiles, ...
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia
(1743-1825) UK educationist and author, important exponent of Unitarianism, whose stories for young children became famous. She is of Proto SF interest for Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812 chap), which conveys in Gothic terms the vision of a Near Future Britain, some time after its defeat in the long war against Napoleonic France; the ruined country, including London itself (see ...
Bruckner, Karl
(1906-1982) Austrian author almost all of whose 30 or so books – many of them written for children, many of them sf – remain untranslated. In Nur zwei Roboter? (1963; trans Frances Lobb as The Hour of the Robots 1964), Russian agents steal advanced Robot designs from America; fortunately, once the robots (named William and Natasha) are built, their mutual affection causes the world to look to peace. ...
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 ...