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Tuesday 22 April 2025
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 21 April 2025
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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Harris, W S
(1865-1956) US minister and author, whose Sermons by the Devil (coll 1904) contain elements of Christian fantasy, and whose Life in a Thousand Worlds (1905) is a mildly fictionalized Fantastic Voyage through our solar system and beyond; the protagonist examines a large number of societies (some Utopian, some Dystopian) on a variety of planets (see ...
Hamit, Francis
(1944- ) US screenwriter, journalist, playwright and author, in the U S Army Security Agency in the 1960s, multiply active from the middle of that decade. Several nonfantastic novels precede his first sf novel, Starmen (2024), which examines the artefactual nature of the American West as mythologized in the Western. Under the command of a mysterious woman, a giant Balloon carrying British ...
Shiner, Lewis
(1950- ) US musician and author who began publishing sf with "Tinker's Damn" for Galileo #5 in October 1977, and who wrote a substantial number of tales before beginning to assemble them in Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (coll 1990), The Edges of Things (coll 1991) and Love in Vain (coll 2001). His Collected Stories (coll 2010) conveniently assembles more than half of ...
Makin, William J
(1893-1944) UK journalist and author who was in active service during World War One, a prolific writer of magazine fiction beginning in the 1920s, his first work of genre interest being "The Black Laugh" in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror for January 1932. At least one of his Jonathan Jow tales, the novel-length "The Monster of the Loch" (20 January-3 March 1934 Pearson's Weekly) with Leslie Arliss ...
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 ...