SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 17 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.
Site updated on 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Horner, Donald W
(1874-1944) UK astronomer, meteorologist and author who specialized in popular-science texts. Though published as boys' fiction, By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and his Friends (1910) offers a numerate and complex vision of a high-tech Near Future, featuring picturephones, television and electric cars, and describing the protagonists' usual tour of the Solar System with prescient realism, though the inhabitants of ...
Fancyclopedia
Fandom has generated many reference works about itself, early examples typically being directories and mailing lists of currently active fans. The grandiose-sounding Fancyclopedia project has, like the present SFE, seen two distinct print editions followed by a third and still current manifestation online. / The first Fancyclopedia (1944) began as an N3F project and was edited by Jack ...
Tani Kōshū
(1951- ) Seiun Award-winning Japanese author in multiple genres, a graduate in civil engineering from the Osaka Institute of Technology, whose work, in retrospect, largely divides into a sprawling Military SF Future History and a set of Near-Future Technothrillers; not included ...
Pettit, Henry
(1842-1921) US architect and author of A Twentieth Century Idealist (1905), the biography of a dreamer that climaxes in a Lost Race Utopia where his visions have come true. [JC]
Wilson, Snoo
(1948-2013) UK playwright and author, born Andrew James Wilson, whose sf novels Spaceache (1984) and Inside Babel (1985) comprise a short series of Satires whose targets are contemporary Politics and culture. Unfortunately, his use of sf instruments is significantly less competent than can be found in some more conventional Mainstream Writers of SF; his attempt to ...
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 ...