SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 16 August 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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Howard, Maude Lesseuer
(? -? ) US author of Miriam and the Mystic Brotherhood (1912), an occult fantasy whose narrative extends well into the Near Future, as members of the eponymous order gain aetheric visions of a transformed America, with the previous government replaced by a high-Technology Utopia; other planets are also seen as inhabited. [JC]
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
Animated film (2013). Sony Pictures Animation/Columbia Pictures. Directed by Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn. Written by John Francis Daley, Jonathan M Goldstein and Erica Rivinoja, based on story by Phil Lord, Chris Miller and Rivinoja. Cast includes Anna Faris, Will Forte and Bill Hader. 95 minutes. Colour. / The fact that original directors and writers Lord and Miller only return as executive producers with a story credit would usually spell danger, particularly given the directorial ...
Ahern, Jerry
Working name of US author Jerome Morrell Ahern (1946-2012), most of whose output consisted of violent Weapons-oriented Post-Holocaust novels, most notably in his Survivalist sequence, in which ex-CIA agent John Rourke attempts to preserve his family after a global nuclear conflict. This is perhaps the most influential series in the subgenre of Survivalist Fiction. The first arc of the ...
Education in SF
Arguably, many sf works project the aura of a classroom, as writers undertake to explain their fantastic worlds' new Technology and other features at length by means of instructional Infodumps. A common pattern in Utopian novels is to pair naïve newcomers with longtime residents assigned to show and describe how their society functions, as seen in Edward Bellamy's ...
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 ...