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Thursday 13 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.
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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 ...
Le Page, Rand
A House Name used by the publishers Curtis Warren for some routine Space Operas and Space Flight adventures published 1952-1953. Authors included William Henry Fleming Bird with War of Argos (1952); John S Glasby with three titles in collaboration with Arthur ...
Minto, William
(1845-1893) Scottish philosopher, academic, journalist and author whose sf novel, The Crack of Doom: A Novel (August 1885-June 1886 Blackwood's Magazine; 1886 3vols), portentously invokes the Disaster threatened by an approaching Comet to shape, intermittently, an otherwise prosaic (and conspicuously dithery) plot; in the event, the End of the World is averted. This novel should ...
Tobias, Michael
(1951- ) US ecologist, filmmaker, mountaineer and author, identified with environmental concerns from the time of the publication of his first book, Dhaulagirideon (1973), a lightly fictionalized study of mountains and mountaineering which was followed by Deva (1982), a novel with the same focus; neither book was literally fantastic, though the rough-hewn Gaia-infused landscape-mysticism of both inspire expansions of ...
L'Estrange, Henry
Pseudonym of an unidentified late-nineteenth-century UK author (? - ) whose Platonia: A Tale of Other Worlds (1893) presents its narrator with an ancient design for a Spaceship which takes him to the planet Platonista, located this side of Mars, where an oddity of the atmosphere permits telescopic perusal of our world (see Time Viewer) as it was 100 ...
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 ...