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Saturday 17 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.
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Dante Alighieri
(1265-1321) Italian poet, one of the five central fathers of the European literary tradition after the fall of Rome, along with Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), François Rabelais, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and William Shakespeare; known primarily for the Commedia (begun circa 1300, mostly written 1313-1321; 1472 as La Comedia di Dante Alleghieri; vt ...
Franklin, Cheryl J
(1955- ) US author, most of whose work fits into a two-part sequence, beginning with the fantasy Fire Lord/Magical Tales of the Taormin books [see Checklist] and continuing with the fantasy-like sf Network/Consortium series, comprising The Light in Exile (1990), The Inquisitor (1992) and Ghost Shadow (1996), set in a Planetary Romance venue, into which interstellar vampires are ...
Jakober, Marie
(1941-2017) Canadian author whose only sf novel, The Mind Gods: A Novel of the Future (1976), is set on a colony planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) where a materialist, tolerant society confronts a repellent spiritual creed (see Religion). With some subtlety the outcome is shown to be not altogether, morally, on the side of the liberals. Jakover's later books of genre ...
Weinberg, Robert E
(1946-2016) US editor, publisher, bookseller and author of Fanzines – in particular Pulp 1970-1981 – focusing on his main interest, the Pulp-magazine world. Much of his task as an editor and publisher was to rediscover and reprint magazine stories from the pulps which might otherwise have disappeared utterly. Though he began to publish fiction of genre interest with "Destroyer" in If for May 1969, ...
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 ...