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Thursday 12 March 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.
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Burroughs, Edgar Rice
(1875-1950) US author whose early life was marked by numerous false starts and failures – at the time he started writing, aged 36, he was a pencil-sharpener salesman – but it would seem that the impulse to create psychically charged Science-Fantasy environments was deep-set and powerful, for he began with a great rush of energy, and within two years had initiated three of his four most important series. / Certainly the first of his published ...
Darnton, John
(1941- ) US journalist and author, during whose career with the New York Times from 1966 until his retirement in 2005 he earned several prizes for his foreign affairs reporting, including a 1982 Pulitzer Prize. His first three novels are sf; in Neanderthal (1996), a Lost Race of Telepathic Neanderthals, bifurcated into peaceful and warlike segments, is discovered in far Tajikistan, deep in ...
El Hazard The Magnificent World
Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) (1995-1996). Original title Shinpi no Sekai Eru Hazādo. AIC, Pioneer LDC. Directed by Hiroki Hayashi. Written by Ryoe Tsukimura. Voice cast includes Yuri Amano, Kouji Ishii, Tomoko Ishimura, Tetsuya Iwanaga, Rio Natsuki, Ryotaro Okiayu, Ryūzaburō Ōtomo, Tomo Sakurai and Yoko Sawami. Seven 30-45 minute episodes. Colour. / Makoto Mizuhara (Iwanaga) accidentally activates an artefact found ...
Gibbs, George
(1870-1942) US author of The Silver Death (1939), a Near Future thriller in which the British and the American secret services combine to steal a German Invention: a super-plane that, left in Nazi hands, threatens to change the course of World War Two. [JC]
Trollope, Anthony
(1815-1882) UK author whose most famous novels make up the Barchester Chronicles, and whose portrayal of the state of England was more voluminously expressed, and perhaps more exact, than any other novelist's of stature before or since his time; his posthumous nonfiction study, The New Zealander (written 1855-1856; 1972), was designed to stave off for as long as possible the fate of England promulgated by Lord Macaulay through his famous 1840 image of a future ...
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 ...