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 ...
Richmond, Leigh
(1911-1995) US author who began publishing with Prologue to an Analogue (June 1961 Analog; 2009 ebook). Her further stories and her several sf novels were mostly written and published in collaboration with her husband, Walt Richmond; three novels were revised by her after his death. Almost all their work together expressed a sense – one formally presented by the Centric Foundation which they founded and directed ...
Big Little Books
Compact children's book format inaugurated in late 1932 by the Whitman Publishing Company (Racine, Wisconsin) with The Adventures of Dick Tracy (graph 1932) and widely imitated by other publishers. A typical Big Little Book had a width of 3 5/8 inches and a height of 4½ inches, with 432 pages making a fat little volume 1½ inches thick (roughly 9.2 cm x 11.4 cm x 3.8cm). Every page of text was faced by a full-page captioned picture. Many ...
Universal Translator
Automated language translation is a highly convenient plot device for sf stories, facilitating Communication with Aliens without miring the action in realistic examination of Linguistic issues. An early example is the Language Rectifier facility of the Telephot Videophone in Hugo Gernsback's ...
Banville, Théodore de
(1823-1891) French poet and author, a formalist and symbolist involved in various literary controversies over the course of his forty-year career. His penetration of the veils of reality may not have been lastingly profound, but the modestly transgressive thrust of the tales assembled as Contes Féeriques (coll 1882; trans Brian Stableford as Magical Tales 2021) demonstrates a use of ...
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 ...