SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 13 August 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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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Pratt, Tim
(1976- ) US author and poet, a graduate of Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop (East) who is currently a senior editor of Locus, for which he has written many reviews and obituaries. He also writes as T A Pratt and as by T Aaron Payton. Pratt began to publish fiction of genre interest with "53rd Annual Mantis Homecoming Dance" in ...
Bloch, Robert
(1917-1994) US author very much better known for his work in Fantasy and Horror – and also for his associational work, of which there is a sizeable corpus – than for his relatively small amount of sf; in the genres of the fantastic other than sf, he was a seminal modernizing figure, and he repeatedly applied one line of insight – the Blochian revelation that the sick protagonist in the foreground of a tale ...
Hawkman
A DC Comics Superhero, usually accompanied by his wife and partner Hawkgirl (sometimes in recent decades called Hawkwoman), who has a similar costume and abilities. First introduced in the 1940s, he was the Reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian priest (see Ancient Egypt in SF) who discovers a mysterious Element, "ninth ...
Operation: Peril
US Comic (1950-1953). American Comics Group (ACG). 16 issues. Artists include Ken Bald, Ogden Whitney and George Wilhelms. Scriptwriters include Richard Hughes. #1-#6, 52 pages; #7-#16, 36 pages. At first each issue had three long strip series (#1 and #3 also having an additional one-off strip), some short text stories, plus various short strips (usually non-fiction); from #12 the series strips increased to four. / ...
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 ...