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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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Alderman, Gill
Working name of UK author Gillian Alderman (1941- ), who worked in microelectronics research until 1984, and began publishing sf with the first two volumes of her Guna sequence – The Archivist: A Black Romance (1989) and The Land Beyond: A Fable (1990) – which established her very rapidly as a figure of interest in the field. As usual in the Planetary Romance, Guna – the world in ...
Bull, Reina M
(1924-2000) UK artist and book/magazine illustrator whose works were variously signed Sington (her birth surname), Reina, Janine, and RMB. Under the last byline she produced all of her sf work, which comprised four memorable covers in 1951 and 1952, two apiece for Science Fantasy and New Worlds; aside from being stylistically very different from the standard fare of the time, these covers carried a sexual charge that ...
Ward, Dayton
(1967- ) US soldier, software developer and author whose career in the latter capacity succeed his eleven years active service in the Marine Corps, most of his stories and books located in various regions of the Star Trek universe, beginning with his first story, "Reflections" in Strange New Worlds (anth 1998) edited by Paula M Block, John J Ordover and Dean Wesley Smith. Almost all of his ...
McMahon, Thomas Patrick
(? - ) US screenwriter and author, mainly of thrillers, in whose The Hubschmann Effect (1973) a new Drug is used in the apparent Genetic Engineering of a group of children, who cause chaos. He contributed at least one story to the Wildsidhe Chronicles Shared World fantasy sequence [not listed]. Thomas Patrick McMahon should not be ...
Paterson, Isabel
(1886-1961) Canadian journalist, literary critic and author, in the US from around 1915, whose The God of the Machine (1943) originated many of the tenets of libertarianism (see Libertarian SF) whose intellectual interactions with Ayn Rand from the 1930s on were mutually influential. Of her fiction, The Road of the Gods (1930) is a Lost Race novel set in Germany 2,000 ...
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 ...