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Sunday 7 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Sparhawk, Bud
Working name of US author John C Sparhawk (1937- ), who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Tomkins Battery Case" in Analog for August 1976, his best known short work being the Sam Boone sequence of tales beginning with "Sam Boone and the Thermal Couple" (October 1995 Analog), about a helterskelter but competent human who deals with visiting Aliens from various parts of ...
Star Control
Videogame series (from 1990). Toys For Bob (TFB). / Star Control (1990 TFB, Amiga, Amstrad, DOS; 1991 C64, MegaDrive, Spectrum) designed by Fred Ford, Paul Reiche III is a Computer Wargame set during an interstellar war between the Alliance of Free Stars and the Hierarchy of Battle Thralls. The titular Star Control is the military arm of Earth's United Nations, a member of the Alliance. The game ...
Shea, Michael
(1938-2009) Scottish diplomat and author, press secretary to the Queen between 1978 and 1987; it has been suggested that he left this post under a cloud for having exhibited candour. His fiction – about twenty novels in all – more safely conveys his wry, politically centrist point of view. As Michael Sinclair (his given names) he wrote a Near-Future thriller in which shameless entrepreneurs manipulate international money markets, ...
Garnett, David S
(1947- ) UK author, author of a large number of books, many of them novels, in various genres and under various names. To differentiate himself from the elder David Garnett he created a middle initial to add to his own name, and in the US signed his early books Dav Garnett, for the same reason; he has published novels also as David Lee and David Ferring. His sf has always been action-oriented and dominated by ...
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 ...