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Monday 13 April 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 13 April 2026
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Tuttle, Lisa
(1952- ) US-born author, in the UK from late 1980, married to Christopher Priest 1981-1987. An early member of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, she very rapidly established her name as a writer in short forms, beginning with her first story, "Stranger in the House", for Robin Scott Wilson's Clarion II (anth ...
West, Wallace
(1900-1980) US lawyer, author, public-relations man and pollution-control expert who began publishing short stories of genre interest with "Loup-Garou" in Weird Tales for October 1927 and sf with "The Last Man" in Amazing from February 1929, thereafter appearing fairly regularly in the magazines until the late 1960s. His stories, though unpretentiously told, exhibit a level-headed cognitive vigour that keeps even his early work from ...
Telepathy
Telepathy or mind-reading is the most popular and durable paranormal ability in sf; its hypothetical roots in scientific reality are discussed under ESP, as are instances of pre-Genre SF usage and various stories which deal with telepathy as part of a wider spectrum of Psi Powers. Roger Luckhurst's The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901 (2002) usefully ...
McDonald, Steven E
(1956- ) UK author, now in the US, who began publishing sf with "Empty Barrels" in Analog for June 1978, his best-known story being "Ideologies" (October 1980 Analog), and whose first novel, The Janus Syndrome (1981), put into Space-Opera guise a tale involving racial oppression, romantic exaggerations of material, and masquerades. He then fell silent, though he has more ...
Payne, Bernal C, Jr
(1941- ) US author the protagonists of whose Time Travel novel for Young Adult readers, It's About Time (1984; vt Trapped in Time 1986), travels back to 1955 where they meet their parents as teenagers. The future children of their marriage must ensure it takes place. The slightly later Back to the Future, released 1985, was conceived ...
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 ...