SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 February 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 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Collectible Card Game
Term used to describe a form of Card Game in which the cards are both collectible in the manner of trading cards (see Collectibles) and usable as a game. Individual cards typically come with their own rules for play, any potential conflicts being resolved by a set of "meta rules" which apply to the game as a whole. Such games are generally sold as starter sets or basic "decks", which contain the core rules and an initial set, or ...
Hardy, Thomas
(1840-1928) UK poet and author, a writer whose greatness was manifest throughout his prolific career; initially most famous for his nineteenth-century novels, beginning with Desperate Remedies (1871 3vols) and concluding with Jude the Obscure (1896), most of them set in the imaginary county of Wessex (roughly corresponding to Dorset). None of them contain explicit narrative elements of the fantastic, though as Brian W Aldiss argued ...
Britton, David
(1945-2020) UK publisher and author, founder with Michael Butterworth (and briefly Charles Partington) of Savoy Books in 1976 in Manchester, whose early list included works by Michael Moorcock, Charles Platt and Jack Trevor Story. With Butterworth, he edited The Savoy Book (anth 1978) and ...
Escher, M C
Working name of Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972). He had no real connections to either sf literature or sf Illustration during his career as an artist specializing in woodcuts and lithographs. However, he is renowned for regularly employing Mathematics to depict impossible scenes, effectively classifying him as an sf artist – and one of great significance, since his paradoxical works relate to bedrock ...
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 ...