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Saturday 14 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.
Site updated on 9 March 2026
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Rendal, Justine
(1948-2004) US author born Randy Goldfield who changed her name legally to Justine Olivia Rendal; in her Young Adult sf tale, A Very Personal Computer (2004), an adolescent in crisis is helped by his Computer, which contains a seemingly sentient program or AI called Conner, which guides him through his difficult times. [JC]
Kipple
Term originating in Fandom, denoting useless or unwanted household junk and ephemera which seems to reproduce itself at the expense of non-kipple possessions – a low-key, domestic manifestation of Entropy (which see). The word spread from Fan Language into popular culture via the novels of Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) ...
Burks, Arthur J
(1898-1974) US military man and author whose first career was in the American Marine Corps (1917-1927); he re-enlisted in World War Two, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. In the meantime, he began to publish for the Pulp magazines, his first work of fantastic interest being "Thus Spake the Prophetess" (November 1924 Weird Tales) as Estil Critchie; his first sf was "Monsters of Moyen" in Astounding for April 1930. ...
Jackson, Sarah K
(? - ) UK professional Ecologist and author whose first novel, Not Alone (2023), clearly draws upon her scientific training in the depiction of a Near Future world devastated by chemical and plastic Pollution. The protagonist, a young mother whose lungs are deteriorating after five years in the south of England, undertakes what could be described as a ...
Hemyng, Bracebridge
(1841-1901) UK barrister and author, born Heming, best known in the USA for the Jack Harkaway boys' stories from 1871, plus many other Dime Novels, not all securely attributed to him. His sf novel, The Commune in London, or Thirty Years Hence: A Chapter of Anticipated History (1871 chap), is an anti-Communard version of the 1871 uprising in Paris as translated into a UK already deeply anxious about threatened upheavals and ...
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 ...