SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Martin-Fehr, John
Working name of German teacher and author Martin Fehr (1905-1978), in the UK from about 1933; his sf novel, The End of His Tether (1972), depicts a Post-Holocaust world soon after a nuclear World War Three has infected the land with numerous diseases and mutations (see Mutants). Eventually representatives of a "new race" – a putative world-order based on strict ...
Mutant X
US tv series (2001-2004). Fireworks Entertainment/Tribune Entertainment/Marvel Studios. Syndicated. Created by Avi Arad. Produced by Adam Haight and Peter Mohan. Cast includes Karen Cliche, Forbes March, Victoria Pratt, John Shea, Lauren Lee Smith and Victor Webster. Directors included Andrew Potter, Bill Corcoran, Jorge Mantesi. Writers included Marak Amato, Howard Chaykin and David Newman. 66 44-minute episodes. Colour. / Mutant X is the name ...
Rata
Pseudonym of Welsh-born journalist and author Thomas Richard Roydhouse (1862-1943), in New Zealand from the late 1880s and then Australia; in his Near Future Yellow Peril novel, The Coloured Conquest (1904), Japan conquers Australia and the rest of the world; by 1913 whites everywhere are doomed. [JC]
Cannan, Gilbert
(1884-1955) UK translator, poet and author whose career was truncated by insanity. His first novel, Peter Homunculus (1909), is a hyperventilated tale of sexual and cultural entrapment, not fantastic. Of his subsequent wide-spread output before he was institutionalized in 1924, Windmills: A Book of Fables (coll of linked stories 1915) is of sf interest, its four long tales all dealing with the inconsistently allegorical Fatland: in two of them, a floating ...
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 ...