SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 29 September 2023
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 25 September 2023
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Pocket Universe
A term first used in a restricted sense by Murray Leinster in "Pocket Universes" (October 1946 Thrilling Wonder), where it is a "contrivance" rather than an encompassing world. It might broadly be said that the inhabitant of any constricted environment lives in a pocket universe, whether as a child, a prisoner, a victim of dementia, a chained watcher in Plato's cave, a resident of Hell or an inhabitant of the world inside Pantagruel's ...
Kochai, Jamil Jan
(1992- ) Pakistan-born author of refugee Afghan family, in US from infancy, whose work cannot be thought of directly in sf terms, though it clearly draws upon the churned mosaic of Fantastika, especially where that cauldron of story incorporates stories linked, as in much Arabian Fantasy, to an imperative over-story [for Arabian Fantasy see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links ...
Mandel, Emily St John
(1979- ) Canadian-born journalist and author, in the US from early adulthood, of sf interest for her fourth novel, Station Eleven (2014), in which the sudden death on stage of an actor performing William Shakespeare's King Lear (performed circa 1605) precipitates (or marks) the onslaught of a deadly Pandemic (see Disaster); a young girl, also on ...
Brinton, Henry
(1901-1977) UK screenwriter and author, variously engaged in social and political work, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; he also wrote detective novels as by Alex Fraser, and published several nonfiction books with Patrick Moore, Exploring Other Planets (1965) being of sf interest. His sf novel Purple-6 (1962) describes a very Near Future world in which the ...
South Korea
A full entry for sf in South Korea must await a contributor fluent in its language and able to report from the inside on the development of the genre there, and on untranslated works. Authors from South Korea who have entries in this encyclopedia are Bok Geo-Il, Un-Su Kim, Chang-rae Lee and Peter Tieryas. / South Korean contributions to ...
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. ...