SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 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 6 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Balscopo, Giovanni Battista
A pseudonym, possibly of the ostensible translator from the Italian of the manuscript of his Satire, John Trotter (1788-1852), though Trotter himself not been identified. In his preface to Travels in Phrenologasto (1825), he claims to have been given Balscopo's manuscript in Bavaria; it is a Fantastic Voyage via Balloon to the planet of Phrenologasto, in close orbit around Earth, whose ...
Rawle, Graham
(1955-2024) UK artist, designer and author, best known for the long Lost Consonants series of comic collages released from 1990 to 2005; his profusely illustrated 2009 edition of L Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1900), using the original text, won him two British Book Design and Production awards. He is of some sf interest for Overland (2018), which fantasticates an historical event from 1942: the construction of a fake town ...
Schwartz, Julius
(1915-2004) US agent and editor, initially involved in sf Fandom (though he never lost interest in fan activities), and later in Comics. Schwartz met his lifelong friend and colleague Mort Weisinger at a meeting of the Scienceers sf group in 1931. Together in 1932 they published what may have been the first true Fanzine, The Time Traveller, and also the later fanzine ...
Versins, Pierre
The name adopted by French scholar, author and self-styled utopian Jacques Chamson (1923-2001), a survivor of Auschwitz. He began writing sf in the 1950s, publishing several novels, including Les étoiles ne s'en foutent pas ["The Stars Care"] (1954), En avant, Mars ["Forward to Mars"] (1955), Feu d'artifice ["Fireworks"] (Paris: Métal, 1955) and Le professeur ["The Professor"] (1956), and over 20 stories (some with his wife ...
Ennes, Hiron
(? - ) US musician and author whose first novel Leech (2022), set in the distant Near Future, in a fastness (see Zone) known as the Interprovincial Medical Institute, nerve centre for a kind of distributed Hive Mind comprised of the world's remaining medical doctors, whose/its primary mission is to protect Homo sapiens from the ...
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 ...