SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 29 September 2023
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 25 September 2023
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Holmes, F Ratcliffe
Working name of Frederick William Ratcliffe-Holmes (circa 1878-1952) UK naturalist, film-producer and author whose The Secret People: Adventure in Africa (1928) is a Lost Race tale set in Africa, where an Ancient Egyptian civilization is discovered by the Young Adult protagonists. [JC]
Lafferty, R A
(1914-2002) US author who worked in the electrical business until retiring to write full-time in 1970; he came to writing only in his forties, publishing his first sf, "Day of the Glacier", with The Science Fiction Stories in January 1960. Over the next twenty-five years (he reportedly retired from writing at the age of about seventy) he produced very many stories – about 200 have been published – and a number of novels. The ...
Science Stories
US Digest-size magazine. Four bimonthly issues, October 1953 to April 1954. The first was published by Bell Publications, Chicago, the rest by Palmer Publications, Evanston; edited by Raymond A Palmer and Bea Mahaffey. Science Stories was effectively a continuation of Other Worlds. It printed no notable fiction, and continued much in the same vein as ...
Wuxia
"Martial Heroes". A shorthand term often employed in writings on Chinese fiction and film, denoting the adventures of martial artists. Originally a calque of the Japanese term bukyō, introduced in the adventure novels of Shunrō Oshikawa around 1902, the term was co-opted by a community of authors scrambling to address the Matter of China in troubled modern times. [For Matter see The ...
Card Game
Term used to describe a form of Game played with physical cards, generally made from paper, cardboard or plastic, and marked with symbols that make them part of a set. Playing cards appear to have been invented in ancient China at some point between the ninth and thirteenth Centuries CE; some confusion arises from the fact that the earliest examples seem to have been "domino cards" marked with the possible results of throwing a pair of six-sided dice, rather than sets ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...