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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 ...
Self, Will
(1961- ) UK journalist and author who early established a name for savagely gonzo Satire, both in his fiction and his nonfiction, where his targets run from adversarial anatomies of the State of the Nation to similar explorations and exposés of his own psyche, sparing nothing in his descriptions of his early years of drug addiction, and of his erratically transgressive acts as a human being. His work in all genres has the scatological ...
Ackerman, Wendayne
(1912-1990) German-born translator, in the US for many years before her death; married to Forrest J Ackerman from 1949 to 1957, and his companion in later years. She translated Stanisław Lem's Niezwyciȩżony i inne opowiadania (Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1964) as The Invincible (1973), from the German translation of the original; and ...
Gsell, Paul
(1870-1947) French critic and author, much of whose critical output concerned the life and work of Anatole France. He is of sf interest for L'Homme qui lit dans les âmes (1928; trans Brian Stableford with added material as The Man Who Could Read Minds, coll 2019), a tale featuring Telepathy achieved through mechanical means (eyeglasses capable of rendering ...
Bourke, Niall
(1981- ) Irish teacher, poet and author, in UK for some time, active from around 2015; his first novel, Line (2021), which is set in an abstract but unmistakable Near Future Dystopian world, carries its protagonist, who had spent the first half of the tale in unending queues, from what seems a Purgatory out of Franz Kafka to Nodnol (ie ...
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 ...