SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
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Abel, R Cox
(1912-2001) UK aviation researcher (for the Hawker Siddeley group of aircraft manufacturing companies) and author who designed a fictional Ion Drive for his collaborative novel Trivana I (1966) with Charles Barren. The titular Spaceship's mission is to colonize Venus (see Colonization of Other Worlds). [DRL]
MacBeth, George
(1932-1992) UK poet and author who contributed six poems to New Worlds from 1966 to 1969. The first of these, "Crab Apple Crisis" (October 1966 New Worlds), is a devastating reductio ad absurdum mapping of World War Three as a dispute between neighbours, organized in terms of the nuclear escalation ladder outlined by Herman Kahn. This appears with three other ...
Wilson, Hardy
(1881-1955) Australian painter, architect and author, most of whose writings espouse visions of Utopia soured by a persistent anti-Semitism, beginning with The Cow Pasture Road (1920). The fictional element in these texts varies from cursory to minimal. His vision of an orientalized ideal home called Celestion, a central glory of the imagined ideal City of Kurrajong, is central to almost all of this work, soaking it in a ...
Witt, Otto
(1875-1923) Swedish mining engineer, publisher and author. Witt's father was an engineer at the copper mine in Falun; Witt followed in his footsteps, studying technology in Norrköping, then at Technische Universität Bergakademie in Freiberg, Germany. After working in Norway and Finland he returned to Sweden in 1912 to fulfil his other ambitions: to be an inventor and a writer. Although Witt had published some fiction before he turned to writing full-time, ...
McCullough, Colleen
(1937-2015) Working name of Australian author Colleen McCullough-Robinson, who remains most famous for The Thorn Birds (1977). In A Creed for the Third Millennium (1985), set in a Near Future America ravaged by Climate Change, a charismatic figure (see Messiahs) ambiguously revitalizes a disillusioned world. The Ladies of Missalonghi (1987) is a ...
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 ...