SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 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
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Meacham, Beth
(1951- ) US author and editor, married to Tappan King from 1978. She worked first as an sf bookseller before joining Ace Books in 1981, where she developed the careers of Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card and Tim Powers, among others; she also discovered James P Blaylock and oversaw ...
Usual Suspects, The
Film (1995). Polygram Entertainment and Spelling Films International present a Blue Parrott and Bad Hat Harry production. Directed by Bryan Singer. Written by Christopher McQuarrie. Cast includes Suzy Amis, Stephen Baldwin, Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Kevin Pollak, Pete Postlethwaite, Kevin Spacey and Benicio del Toro. Colour. 106 minutes. / A group of career criminals (see Crime and Punishment) struggles to ascertain the ...
Adams, Norman
(1933-2014) US illustrator, active from the early 1950s, often signing his work Adams, which has occasionally led to some confusion with the work of Tom Adams, as both specialized in trompe l'oeil effects, in both cases sometimes startlingly effective. Adams may be best known for his cover for the first edition of Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs; the image itself closely replicates his cover for an 1963 UK reprint, as ...
Light, John
(1943- ) UK poet and author, who began publishing sf for Robert Hale Limited with the Annals of Lavandrei sequence comprising The Well of Time (1981), The Lords of Hate (1997) and Conspiracy of the Dead (2004), Space Opera adventures consistent with Hale's requirements. In the Melgor Erdin sequence comprising No Space in Time ...
Williams, David J
(1971- ) UK author whose Cyberpunk-flavoured Autumn Rain Trilogy – comprising The Mirrored Heavens (2008), The Burning Skies (2009) and The Machinery of Light (2010) – begins with the Near Future destruction of a Space Elevator and the assignment to protect America undertaken by two counterintelligence agents, who ...
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 ...