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Monday 14 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 7 July 2025
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LaFarge, Paul
Working name of US academic and author Paul B La Farge (1970-2023), who also published as Paul La Farge. His first novel, The Artist of the Missing (1999), hovers along the water margin where metafiction (see Fabulation) becomes Fantastika and where narrative topoi dependent on the influence of (not untypically) Franz Kafka extend past the metaphorical applications typical of the ...
Dubina, Peter
(1940-1990) Czech-born author, in Germany after 1945, who also wrote as by R F Garner and Joh Kirby, concentrating on Westerns for most of his career; of sf interest is Eintscheidung im Weltraum (1973; trans Patricia Crampton as Decision in Space 1976), in which three human Scientists are abducted by a UFO and tricked into believing in the ...
Mundy, Talbot
Pseudonym of UK-born author William Lancaster Gribbon (1879-1940), who emigrated to the USA in 1909 after his early life as a confidence man, ivory poacher and all-round rogue in India and British Africa had culminated in the threat – not in the event realized – of a prison sentence. He soon became a professional author, with most of his work first appearing in Adventure magazine, where he became the star writer; after 1935 he left ...
Karl, Jean E
(1927-2000) US editor and author, important in the former capacity for her founding of Atheneum Children's Books, where she edited Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea sequence and Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence, and many other titles. Her nonfiction titles – such as From Childhood to Childhood: Children's Books and Their Creators (John Day Co, 1970) – were usually based on her experiences ...
Mars, Alastair
(1915-1985) Canadian-born soldier and author, in the UK from infancy, in the Navy from 1932; he became well known for the 1952 court martial that ended his military career (in the midst of a dispute regarding his penury at naval rates of pay, he had refused to report for duty); his last rank was lieutenant commander. After 1952, he published several novels that drew on his intimate knowledge of submarines at war Under the Sea (he had been commander of ...
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 ...