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Friday 13 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.
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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 ...
Mendum, Bedloe
(1875-? ) US art expert, copyeditor and author of The Barbarian and Other Stories (coll 1899), whose long title tale is a Satire depicting from the viewpoint of a Chinese immigrant a Dystopia called Vulgaria, clearly intended to stand for America. Technology and Transportation are advanced, but the population is corrupt and foolish. [JC]
Ryan, Amy Kathleen
(? - ) US author who has concentrated on work for the Young Adult market, including her first novel, Shadow Falls (2005), which is nonfantastic. The young protagonist of Vibes (2009), who is Telepathic, find school and family increasingly stressful; the Sky Chasers sequence comprising Glow (2011) and Spark (2012) locates its ...
Ehrmann, Max
(1872-1945) US lawyer and author, most famous for "Desiderata", a prose poem whose copyright was registered by Ehrmann on 3 January 1927 which sets down a range of homilies about living the good life; it was published in various formats (including many 1960s and 1970s posters, and a spoken recitation as "Spock Thoughts" on a 1968 album by Leonard Nimoy) and is often wrongly sourced to a seventeenth-century tombstone inscription or Latin text. Of sf interest is Ehrmann's A Fearsome Riddle ...
Ruhen, Carl
(1937-2013) New Zealand-born author, in Australia from 1947, highly prolific from the early 1960s to 1989 with 78 reported novel publications – many from the high-output Australian "pulp" publisher Horwitz – plus numerous short stories and articles. His novels included some routine horror, not listed below. Ruhen is of sf interest as probably the principal collaborator on the film Tie Mad Max 2 (1982) with Terry Hayes and George ...
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 ...