SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 14 February 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 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Film (1963). Hawk/Columbia. Produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Written by Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George, based on Two Hours to Doom (1958; vt Red Alert) by Peter Bryant (pseudonym of Peter George). Cast includes Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens, George C Scott, Peter Sellers and Keenan Wynn. 94 minutes. Black and white. / This, the first of ...
Hagerty, Neil
(1965- ) US musician and occasional author, best known as one half (with his then partner Jennifer Herrema) of the influential alternative rock band Royal Trux. His sole novel to date, Victory Chimp (1997), follows the titular primate across the Multiverse, attempting to free his race from oppression, in a Drug-addled non-linear style seemingly indebted to William S ...
Bibliographies
For students of science fiction, here luckily distinguished from students of what were once called non-genre literatures, bibliography is the second arm of criticism. Science fiction bibliography encompasses both description (physical description of the books of a single author or press) and context (what was published, in what significant form, when, and where). Compiling checklists and bibliographies was initially and has to a surprising extent remained a labour of love, very often carried ...
Pemberton-Billing, Noel
(1881-1948) UK aviator, inventor, author, publisher and Member of Parliament for Hertford 1916-1921, who saw military service in the second Boer War; in Australia from 1918. His surname has also been given without the hyphen. He is of sf interest for the play High Treason (first performed 1928; ?1929), a Scientific Romance inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and set ...
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 ...