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Thursday 13 August 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.
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Tékumel
Role Playing Game setting. Designed by M A R Barker. / Tékumel is a richly realized future milieu, depicted in a Science Fantasy mode analogous to that employed by Marion Zimmer Bradley for her world of Darkover. The setting is arguably comparable with J R R Tolkien's Secondary World of ...
Wallis, Redmond
(1933- ) New Zealand author active from the early 1960s whose Young Adult Triangulum sequence comprising Starbloom (1989) and The Mills of Space (1989) faces its young protagonists with Space Opera challenges, as an Alien civilization threatens Earth with a deadly Drug. [JC]
Acworth, Andrew
(1857-1895) UK author – according to Darko Suvin, a barrister named Andrew Oswald Acworth – whose sf novel, A New Eden (1896), set 100 years in the future, features the escape of two depressed protagonists from the decaying republican UK, which has suffered from Devolution of the human stock, to an egalitarian but hidebound Island Utopia which fails ...
Beck, Alan F
(1944- ) US artist best known for his wryly humorous, usually small paintings, prints and originals of which are hugely popular at conventions; he has done relatively little Illustration work, mainly for the magazine Space and Time, although there are also some book covers, the first being for the Fantasy Pine Tree Wind (2002) by A L Neff. He received his art ...
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 ...