SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 June 2022
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 20 June 2022
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Robida, Albert
(1848-1926) French illustrator and author, the first visual artist who could be said to specialize in sf Illustration, with an abiding interest in fabulated Inventions; the most important and popular nineteenth-century figure in this nascent field. Though he was clearly working in the tradition of such French artists and illustrators as J J Grandville, Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) and Gustave Doré, Robida – who published more than 60,000 illustrations in a career that began in ...
Easson, Robert
(1941- ) UK author living in the USA; his slim and eccentric sf story collection is The Bird; The Ghoul; and, In the Name of My Friend (coll 1968 chap). [JC/DRL]
Cosmology
Cosmology is the study of the Universe as a whole, its nature and its origins. It is a speculative science (there being little opportunity for experiment) and in discussing past writings on the subject it is occasionally difficult to distinguish essays and fictions. Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1634) is basically an essay inspired by the heliocentric theory of the Universe, opposing the Aristotelian system then favoured by the Church (see Proto SF). Works of a similar nature include Gabriel ...
Erskine, Thomas
(1750-1823) Scottish barrister, famous in the 1790s for his frequently successful court defences of the freedom of the press, including a famous defense of Thomas Paine in 1792, and of figures prosecuted by a government whose responses to perceived republican threats to the British state prefigure some government actions in the early twenty-first century; he served as Lord Chancellor 1806-1807. He was a poet, publishing intermittently from as early as 1768; a polemicist, whose many influential ...
Pineiro, R J
(1961- ) Cuban-born author, in US from the age of 16, who specializes in Technothrillers, including Siege of Lightning (1993), Ultimatum (1994), Breakthrough (1997), none of strong sf interest. Some later tales of higher sf interest include 01-01-00 (1999), whose protagonists find the secret of a deadly very Near Future Computer virus in an Asian Lost World, Firewall (2002), which rather similarly features a kind of Basilisk, a computer code that when unleashed will ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...