SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 14 June 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 9 June 2025
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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Brown, Charles N
(1937-2009) US publisher and editor, an sf fan who began his involvement in the field in the 1950s and who remains best known for co-founding (with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf) and running the sf news magazine Locus in 1968, initially as a Fanzine (see Newszines) addressed primarily to fans in the Boston, Massachusetts area; but eventually expanding its remit until it became the default organ of record and ...
Scientists
Scientists in pre-twentieth-century sf often exhibited symptoms of social maladjustment, sometimes to the point of insanity; they were characteristically obsessive and antisocial. Some scientists were quasidiabolical figures, like Coppelius in E T A Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" ["The Sandman"] (comprising volume one of Nachtstücke, 1816) or Mary Shelley's eponymous ...
Wignall, T C
(1881-1958) UK journalist and author, usually for children as Trevor Wignall, in active service during World War One. He began publishing in the magazines in 1912 or earlier; his sf novel Atoms (20 October-29 December 1922 Yellow Magazine; 1923) with G D Knox posits a world with abundant Power Sources including Nuclear Energy and ...
Semiprozine
In the terminology of sf Fandom, this expression – once colloquial but enshrined since 1983 in the constitution of the World Science Fiction Society, the body that administers the Hugos – means a semiprofessional magazine as opposed to an Amateur Magazine, or Fanzine. Originally, according to that constitution, a magazine with a circulation of more than 10,000 is 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 ...