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Friday 12 December 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Brummels, J V
(1951- ) US poet, rancher and author of some fiction, with Wayne State College since 1977, where he is Poet-in-Residence; his sf novel, Deus ex Machina (1989), is a complexly literate rendering in Cyberpunk-influenced terms of an urban USA facing the death of the Sun. There is a choice, for some, of escaping into space; but it is an option Brummels offers without any exuberance. [JC]
Todd, Ruthven
(1914-1978) Scottish scholar, poet and author, in US from 1947-1958, and then Majorca; his most important nonfiction work, Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (1946), effectively argued the imaginative power – when conjoined – of the two subtitled categories, instancing at length the work of William Blake (1748-1827) and John Martin; as R T Campbell, he wrote several detective novels, beginning with Unholy Dying ...
Edson, J T
(1928-2014) UK author, formerly a British Army dog-handler, whose large output consisted almost exclusively of the Westerns for which he was best known, nearly 140 of them. He also wrote the Bunduki sequence of Planetary Romances, beginning with Bunduki (1975), which is partially derived (with the permission of the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, which was later ...
Space Ship Sappy
Short US film (1957). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Jules White. Written by Jack White. Cast included Doreen Woodbury, Benny Rubin, Marilyn Hanold, Lorinne Crawford, Harriet Tyler, Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Joe Besser. 16 minutes. Black and white. / The Three Stooges (at the time Howard, Fine and Besser), in need of work, are hired by Scientist A J Rimple (Rubin), though they are unaware he will be taking them on a ...
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 ...