SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 14 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
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Isaacs, Leonard
(1939-1988) American teacher and author, in the 1970s an associate professor of biology at the Justin Morrill College of Michigan State University, where with R Glenn Wright he co-directed the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop (East). He contributed Poetry to Clarion III (anth 1973) edited by Robin Scott Wilson and to ...
Barfield, Owen
(1898-1997) UK author and philologist who served in World War One; his first book, The Silver Trumpet (1925), is Fantasy. He was long involved with the Anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). A member of the Inklings group and a long-time associate of C S Lewis, Barfield contributed to Essays Presented to Charles Williams (anth ...
Sturgeon's Law
An aphorism formulated by Theodore Sturgeon in the early 1950s: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." This needs to be placed in context as his response to blanket condemnations of sf which were based on the worst examples of the genre. According to James Gunn, Sturgeon's Law originated in a Sturgeon talk at the 1953 Worldcon, and was phrased approximately as ...
Bradford, K Tempest
Main pseudonym of unidentified teacher, blogger and author (1978- ), who also writes as by Kim Bradford and Finley T Larkin. As Larkin, she began to publish work of genre interest with "Elf Aware" in The Cafe Irreal for August 2002, most of her subsequent fiction being fantasy. In 2020 she shared a special Locus Award with Nisi Shawl (whom see) and Cynthia Ward for the online writing classes and workshops still continuing as ...
Schwahn, John George
(? -? ) US author of The Tableau; Or, Heaven as a Republic (1892), a Utopia governed by a strict adherence to reason. [JC]
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 ...