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Monday 16 March 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 9 March 2026
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Time in Reverse
The notion of Time running backwards, with effects preceding causes, is both strongly counter-intuitive and fascinatingly easy to imagine: playing a movie in reverse is among the oldest and most familiar of special effects. The Time Traveller in H G Wells's The Time Machine (1895) sees his housekeeper apparently moving backwards through the room during the final moments of his return journey from the future. Still earlier ...
Slonczewski, Joan
(1956- ) US professor of biology, specializing in genetics, and author who began publishing sf with her first novel, Still Forms on Foxfield (1980), a tale in which most of her subsequent concerns take initial shape. A human community of Quakers, having fled an apparently doomed Earth and having establishing on the planet Foxfield a sane and Ecology-obedient relationship with the native species, is contacted centuries later by a ...
Gillon, Meir
(1907-1989) Transylvanian-born UK author, born Meir Selig Goldstein – surname changed to Gillon in the 1940s – whose sf novel, The Unsleep (1961) with Diana Gillon, describes the effect of the Drug Sta-Wake which, by enforcing sleeplessness, contributes to the creation of an admass Dystopia. [JC]
Roberts, Jane
(1929-1984) US author perhaps best remembered for such speculative works as Dialogues of the Soul & Mortal Self in Time (1975), which take the form of a series of connected poems based, as was much of her voluminous speculative works, on lessons she claimed were channelled through her by an entity known as Seth. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Red Wagon" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for December 1956. Her ...
Bok, Hannes
Pseudonym of US illustrator, author, and astrologer Wayne Francis Woodard (1914-1964). Sf Illustration has had very few mavericks: Bok was possibly the most famous. He did not let editors and publishers dictate the way he designed his work, and thereby lost hundreds of commissions. As Brian W Aldiss notes in Science Fiction Art (1975), he was one of the field's "masters of the macabre", a stylist ...
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 ...