SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
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Sword and Sorcery
This term – describing a subgenre of Fantasy embracing adventures with swordplay and Magic – was coined by Fritz Leiber in a letter published in the fanzine Ancalagon #2 (April 1961) edited by George Heap; but the kind of story it refers to is much older than that. (Other terms that overlap with "sword-and-sorcery" are Heroic Fantasy and ...
Space Fact and Fiction
UK magazine in slim standard Pulp format. Eight monthly issues March to October 1954, several undated, published and edited by Gerald Swan, London. It published mainly reprints from wartime issues of Future Fiction and Science Fiction Stories, slanted towards the juvenile reader, but also new stories; the April 1954 issue was all new, though of no merit. An album of unsold copies in jumbled ...
Ingermanson, Randall
(1958- ) US author in whose City of God sequence of Christian Time Travel tales – comprising Transgression (2000), Premonition (2003) and Retribution (2004) – a Jewish physicist initiates a plot to kill the apostle Paul; further volumes in the sequence continue to explore post-Biblical times. The Near Future Oxygen sequence – comprising ...
Airships
In this encyclopedia the term "airship" is generally used for powered lighter-than-air craft extrapolated from dirigible Balloons and employed as Transportation. However, it seems reasonable also to mention the winged but machine-driven Consolidator featured in Daniel Defoe's The Consolidator (1705), which was soon forgotten, like all Chinese Inventions, ...
McCoy, Glen
(1954- ) UK screenwriter and author of a Tie contributed to the Doctor Who universe, Doctor Who: Timelash (1985), which novelizes his Doctor Who Television script from the same year. [JC]
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 ...