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Monday 5 October 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 5 October 2026
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Durrell, Lawrence
(1912-1990) Indian poet and author (his English/Irish family settled in India about 1850), in England from 1923 to 1935, then in Greece and elsewhere; best known for the Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960). His fourth novel, Cefalû (1947; vt The Dark Labyrinth 1961) is a Near Future tale set Underground in a Cretan Labyrinth, where emanations out of the ...
Tuning, William
(1935-1982) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Survivability" in Analog for May 1973 His first novel, Tornado Alley (1978), dramatizes Near-Future attempts to deal with very bad storms (see Weather Control). Fuzzy Bones (1981) is a continuation of H Beam Piper's Fuzzy series, quite successfully extracting from ...
Williamson, Michael Z
(1967- ) UK-born soldier (now retired) and author, in Canada then USA from early adulthood, whose first novel, Freehold (2004), initiated the Grainne War sequence which was eventually joined by the Ripple Creek sequence beginning with Better To Beg Forgiveness ... (2007), both series and some shorter works eventually slotted into the Freehold Universe over-series. Williamson adhered subsequently in much of his work to the ...
Sargasso Sea
This region in the west of the North Atlantic Ocean, with Bermuda near its western edge, is named for the Sargassum seaweed that grows there and which – along with historical accounts of sailing ships being becalmed there – gave rise to the popular legend of a seaweed-choked Zone of mystery, a mist-shrouded oceanic Lost World of derelict ocean craft, very probably infested with Monsters and ...
Sutphen, Van Tassel
(1861-1945) US author, who early focused on golf, as in The Golficide and Other Tales of the Fair Green (coll 1898); a later volume, The Nineteenth Hole: Being Tales of the Fair Green: Second Series (coll 1901), includes two tales of golfing sf (see Games and Sports), "The Greatest Thing in the World" being set in 1999 when the game fully dominates American life. Several of the tales assembled in The Gates of Chance (coll ...
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 ...