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Tuesday 15 July 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 14 July 2025
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Reeve, Arthur B
(1880-1936) US scriptwriter and author almost exclusively remembered for his Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective sequence, the most significant titles being the eighty-two short stories first published 1910-1918 in monthly instalments beginning with "The Case of the Helen Bond" (December 1910 Cosmopolitan) – the subsequent stories all appearing in the same journal – and then in various magazines 1919-1935, all eventually assembled in book form; later titles in the ...
Schisgall, Oscar
(1901-1984) Russian-born editor and author, in USA from an early age; extremely prolific in short forms, with at least 4,000 stories and articles credited, many of them for the Reader's Digest. He is of sf interest for the Baron Ixell sequence which appeared in Clues from 1927 to 1932, beginning with "The Circle of Terror" (July 1927 Clues) and ending with "The Crime of the Century" (October 1932 Clues); Baron Ixell: Crime Breaker (coll 1929) ...
Anti-Utopia
A term sometimes used to denote the dark opposite of Utopia, as surveyed in this encyclopedia's entry Dystopia (the term normally used here). For example, James Blish in The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction (coll 1964) as by William Atheling Jr describes The Space Merchants (July-August 1952 Galaxy as "Gravy Planet"; rev and ...
McLoughlin, John C
(1949- ) US author whose first novel, The Helix and the Sword (1983), is set partly in a Ruined Earth venue five millennia hence, where Mutant beasts have filled the niches abandoned by the remaining humans, who live in Space Habitats restricted to the solar system; when Earth is found to be once again inhabitable, an ...
Waidner, Isabel
(1974- ) German-born academic, editor, journalist and author, in UK from 1995. Their first book of fiction, the novel Gaudy Bauble (2017), surreally fantasticates a pantomimic London which it would be inadvisable to call Near-Future, but which, as with the rest of their fiction, seems akin to the near future. Sterling Karat Gold (2021) is partly set in a fabulated Camden Town. ...
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 ...