SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 5 October 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 5 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
King of the Monsters
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine. Cousin Publications Incorporated. No editor named. One undated issue, published 1977. / This magazine was apparently intended as a one-time effort to capitalize on the release of the Dino de Laurentiis remake of King Kong (1976). Such one-shot film magazines came into their own in the US during the 1970s, remaining a popular format throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. ...
Barnes, Steven
(1952- ) US author, married to Tananarive Due from 1998. He began publishing work of genre interest with "Moonglow" in Vampires, Werewolves and Other Monsters (anth 1974) edited by Roger Elwood, and his career was primarily associated in its early days with Larry Niven, Barnes's collaborator on most of his early novels, including the first, Dream Park ...
Gentle, Mary
(1956- ) UK author who began publishing with a fantasy for young adults, A Hawk in Silver (1977; rev 1985), and who came to general notice with her Orthe sequence – Golden Witchbreed (1983) and Ancient Light (1987), both assembled, with a linked story, as Orthe: Chronicles of Carrick V (omni 2002) – which, despite the fantasy ring of the first title, is sf. The protagonist of both volumes, a ...
Colombia
Colombian sf has gone through at least four stages in its history. The first stage runs from the late 1800s to 1930 (these and other dates are approximations). One cannot speak of science fiction literature per se during these decades, but rather of the isolated appearance of sf motifs and short stories, such as "Phrazomela" ["Phrazomela"] (December 1892 Revista Gris 1:3) by Emilio Cuervo Márquez (1873-1937), "Bogotá en el año 2000" ["Bogotá in the Year ...
Golden Age of SF
It has been said, cynically, that the Golden Age of sf is twelve. (This epigram, often wrongly ascribed or paraphrased with slightly different ages, was coined by the sf fan Peter Graham [1939-2004].) / Certainly there is no objective measure by which we can say that the sf of any one period was notably superior to that of any other. Nonetheless, in conventional usage (at least within Fandom) some older readers have referred to the years 1938-1946 as sf's first ...
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 ...