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Wednesday 16 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.
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Caspian, Jonatha Ariadne
(1960- ) US author of a game Tie, Torg: The Possibility Wars #3: The Nightmare Dream (1991), based on Torg (1990). Fittingly, it is unambitious. [JC]
Charbonneau, Louis
(1924-2017) US journalist and author who also wrote nonfantastic Westerns as by Carter Travis Young; after writing some radio plays at the end of the 1940s, he worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times (1952-1971), beginning to publish sf novels with No Place on Earth (1958), about a coercive Dystopia. He produced sf for several years thereafter, publishing: Corpus Earthling (1960), about ...
Irwin, Robert
(1946-2024) UK academic, mediaevalist, professional juggler (briefly) and author whose work in Arabian studies, of importance in itself, underpins the world envisioned in his first and most famous novel, The Arabian Nightmare (1983; rev 1987), which may be the definitive rendering of its central conceit: a mise en abyme-like dream narrative whose protagonist, upon seeming to awaken, only finds himself passing out of one story through a Portal into a deeper dream [for ...
Easton, Edward
Pseudonym of US author Edward P Malerich (1940- ), author of The Miscast Gentleman (1978), a mildly intriguing Time-Travel tale whose protagonist is transported in adventures in Elizabethan England; and The Pirate of Hitchfield (1978), which similarly transports its protagonist into the seventeenth century, where he becomes involved with pirates. [JC]
Spider, The
US Pulp magazine, 118 issues October 1933 to December 1943; monthly until February 1943, bimonthly thereafter. Published by Popular Publications; edited initially by Rogers Terrill until mid-1936 when he was elevated to Editorial Director, and then by a succession of editors until W Ryerson Johnson closed down the final issue. The Spider, one of the hero/villain pulps, began as a ...
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 ...