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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 ...
Brennan, Frederick Hazlitt
(1901-1962) US journalist, screenwriter and author, active in the first capacity from 1923, and in the second capacity between 1929 and 1963; of his novels, One of Our H Bombs Is Missing (1955) is of sf interest for its exploitation of very Near Future Cold War tensions in the story of a group of pilots who go rogue, steal a nuclear bomb, and attempt to bring about the ...
McSherry, Frank D, Jr
(1927-1997) US anthologist who worked with Martin H Greenberg and Charles G Waugh on more than twenty Anthologies, chiefly of ghostly and supernatural fiction. Of sf interest is the Baseball-themed Baseball 3000 (anth 1981) edited with Greenberg and Waugh. The Best Horror Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle (coll 1989), edited with ...
Rucker, Rudy
Working name of US mathematician, computer programmer and author Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (1946- ), who has advanced degrees in Mathematics from Rutgers University, concentrating on transfinite mathematics and multidimensional geometry. Like many sf writers, he began very early to produce stories, but unlike most who became successful he had difficulty placing his work, in which mathematical concepts and diagrams tended to generate both ...
Didelot, Francis
Working name of Madagascar-born French author and screenwriter Roger-Francis Didelot (1902-1985), who wrote numerous detective novels, some as by José Bernard. He began to publish work of sf interest with La Machine à prédire la mort ["The Death Prediction Machine"] (October 1938-January 1939 Ric et Rac; 1939) with Charles Robert-Dumas (1875-1946), whose titular Machine can accurately foretell the time of death (see ...
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 ...