SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 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
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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 ...
McConnell, Frank
(1942-1999) US academic and critic, a professor of English at Northwestern University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wrote extensively on sf and many other subjects; his writings included a regular media column for Commonweal magazine and four detective novels, and he served four times on the committee that awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His work in the genre included editing The Time Machine/The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition (omni ...
Maitland, Derek
(1943-2019) UK war photographer and author whose sf Satires – T Minus Tower (1971), about a proposed transfer of the eponymous tower into space as a Space-Habitat hotel, and The Alpha Experience (1974) – exhibit a certain apocalyptic flippancy but failed to target coming UK trends with any real accuracy. [JC]
Rhodes, H Henry
(? -? ) US author of Where Men Have Walked: A Story of the Lucayos (1909), a complex Lost Race whose protagonist – trapped after dark adventures on a mysterious Island – spelunks deep Underground, where a strange figure Timeslips by trance backwards to a much earlier age, where an electricity-worshipping ...
Swyler, Erika
(1975- ) US playwright and author whose Book of Speculation sequence beginning with The Book of Speculation (2015) which, in a manner evocative of James P Blaylock's exercises in Pacific-Rim Magic Realism, Equipoises a fantasy-based tale of doom attending an old house half-awash in the rising seas of Long Island (New York), with hints that ...
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 ...