SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 23 April 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 21 April 2025
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
May, Julian
(1931-2017) US editor and author, active in US Fandom in the 1940s and early 1950s; married to T E Dikty from 1953 to his death in 1991, founding with him Publication Associates in 1957 (see his entry for this and later enterprises); he also served as editor and agent for all her mature work. She began publishing sf with "Dune Roller" for Astounding in December 1951, a frequently anthologized story that was ...
Goodman, Dickie
(1934-1989) US record producer who with his aspiring songwriter friend Bill Buchanan (1930-1996) launched both their careers with the comic novelty record "The Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2" (1956). Inspired by Orson Welles's radio broadcast War of the Worlds (1938), it is credited with being the first record to use the "break-in" technique, which evolved into modern-day sampling. Buchanan and Goodman ...
Fantastyka
Polish monthly Magazine launched in the gloomy times of martial law in October 1982 as the first press publication exclusively devoted to Fantastika (John Clute's umbrella term is consciously and deliberately evoked here as derived from the Eastern European languages, including Polish "fantastyka", which universally covers all literature with fantastic elements in it and rather naturally was chosen as ...
Black Terror, The
US Comic (1943-1949). Nedor Publishing Company/Visual Editions Inc. 27 issues. Artists include Al Camy, Mort Meskin, Ed Moritz, Jerry Robinson and Alex Schomburg. Scriptwriters include Donald Bayne Hobart, Richard Hughes and Charles S Strong. Originally 68 pages, then declining until #26 and #27 had only 36. Usually four long strips per issue, a couple with five, whilst #26 and #27 had three; there would also be at least one text ...
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 ...