SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 December 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 2 December 2024
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Scot, Hew
Pseudonym of Scottish physician John James Graham Brown (1853-1925), a President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh; as Hew Scot he wrote two thrillers with sf overtones: The Way of War (1907) which concerns a Near Future German conspiracy involving the Invasion of Britain; and A Wild Intrigue (1910), in which the formula for a new Weapon – an explosive of ...
KULT: The Temple of Flying Saucers
Videogame (1989; vt Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess in the US). ERE Informatique. Designed by "Arbeit von Spacekraft" (Johan Robson). Platforms: Amiga, AtariST, DOS. / In the future of The Temple of Flying Saucers, humanity has split into three distinct subspecies after a (presumably nuclear) apocalypse: the Psionically gifted Tuners, the physically mutated Protozorqs and the unaltered Normals. The player ...
McDevitt, Jack
Working name of US author John Charles McDevitt (1935- ), who began publishing sf with "The Emerson Effect" for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine in December 1981, coming to prominence with "Cryptic" (April 1983 Asimov's), a tale whose theme – First Contact between humans and the Alien races who are sending ...
House, Edward Mandell
(1858-1938) US political figure – in his refusal of official duties rather like an earlier Bernard Baruch (1870-1965) – involved with President Woodrow Wilson in setting up the League of Nations; his urgency about the USA's joining the League played some part in his dismissal in 1919 from Wilson's inner circle of advisors. Philip Dru, Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935 (1912), published anonymously, is a surprisingly wide-ranging exercise in ...
Outer Planets
For a long while, relatively little attention was paid in sf to the planets beyond Jupiter. Of them only Saturn was known to the ancients – Uranus was discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930 – and it is therefore the only outer planet featured in Athanasius Kircher's and Emanuel Swedenborg's interplanetary tours. Uranus, however, is included in the anonymous ...
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 ...