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Friday 12 December 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Campbell, John W, Jr
(1910-1971) US author and editor who took a degree in physics in 1932 from MIT and Duke University, where it is likely he became aware of J B Rhine's early experiments in parapsychology (see Pseudoscience). Campbell was a devotee of the SF Magazines from their inception, and sold his first stories while still a teenager, beginning with "Invaders from the Infinite" to ...
Kelley, Leo P
(1928-2002) US author, for some time also an advertising copywriter, whose early works were mostly sf, but who concentrated on Westerns from about 1980. He began publishing sf with "Dreamtown, U.S.A." in If for February 1955, and published occasionally in the magazines for some years. In general in his novels, he demonstrated a verve for sharp clear ideas, and some of these novels are genuine Satires with ...
Tate, Peter
(1940- ) Welsh journalist and author who began publishing sf with "The Post-Mortem People" in New Worlds for March 1966 (rev vt "Beyond the Weeds" in SF 12, anth 1968, ed Judith Merril); this was assembled with his other short fiction as Seagulls under Glass and Other Stories (coll 1975). His first novel, The Thinking Seat (1969), began a loose sequence of tales ...
True, John Preston
(1859-1933) US author, mostly of historical novels; the eponymous meteor fragment, in The Iron Star and What It Saw On Its Journey through the Ages: From Myth to History (1899), which is written for older children, inspires or is in the vicinity of significant moments in the gradual Evolution of Homo sapiens, a voyage initially depicted in Prehistoric SF terms, later more mundanely. [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 ...