SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 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 14 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Boyle, T Coraghessan
(1948- ) US author who sometimes signs his more recent work as T C Boyle; very much better known for his non-fantastic fiction – novels like World's End (1987) or The Road to Wellville (1993) – than for his relatively rare (and recent) sf. Several stories to be found in After the Plague: Stories (coll 2001) are of sf interest, including the Post-Holocaust title story, which is set ...
Kotani, Eric
Pseudonym used by Japanese-US astrophysicist and author Yoji Kondo (1933-2017) for all his fiction. He served as professor of astrophysics at the University of Oklahoma (1972-1977), the University of Houston (1974-1977), the University of Pennsylvania (1978-1988) and the George Mason University (from 1989), with over 200 scientific papers to his credit. He edited the journal Comments on Astrophysics for many years from 1979, was President of the International Astronautical Union ...
Gambino, Fred
(1956- ) UK illustrator who has created many book covers but is now primarily active in screen projects. His earliest inspirations were Doctor Who, the Gerry Anderson puppet shows and, a little later, an exhibition by Chris Foss. He graduated from Derby College of Art and Technology and began presenting his portfolio to London publishers. His first cover was for a 1978 ...
Temianka, Dan
(? - ) US author and critic who began to publish work of genre interest with reviews of Jack Vance in Fantasy Review for June 1986 as Daniel Temianka. His major critical publication is The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Ahulph to Zipangote: The Coined Words of Jack Vance (1992; vt The Jack Vance Lexicon: The Coined Words of Jack Vance, from Ahulph to Zipangote 1995; ...
Mayer, Robert
(1939-2019) US journalist and author best known for his first novel, Superfolks (1977), a gonzo Satire of Superheroes as they featured in Comics before they began to be depicted, from the early 1980s on, in darker and more ambivalent tones – a change that can be partly laid down to the influence of Mayer's novel, whose protagonist, David Brinkley, is unmistakably based on ...
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 ...