SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 13 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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War
This very broad theme permeates large areas of sf, and is principally dealt with in this encyclopedia under the heading Future War. The historical World War One and World War Two have their own more specific entries, as does the dominant latter-twentieth-century nightmare that never in fact achieved reality, the nuclear Holocaust of ...
Stein, Herbert
(1916-1999) US economist and author, whose conservative-liberal views on markets and governments seem far more centrist than they did in the twentieth century; he is known for an aphorism, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop," which became something of a mantra for those opposed to governmental "interference" with neoliberal aspirations. He wrote one Near Future sf novel, On the Brink (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977) with Benjamin ...
Rose, Malcolm
(1953- ) UK chemist and author of Young Adult fiction who may be best known for the Lawless and Tilley series of crime novels (not listed below) which, although the investigators are scientifically literate, is not sf. His first novels, which tend to focus on various Disasters, are of genre interest: The Obtuse Experiment (1993) is a thriller set in the ...
Jones, Mark
(?1947-2003) UK author of nonfiction about Russia and Communism [not listed below] and of a Technothriller, Black Lightning (1995), in which post-Communist Russia develops a gigantic electromagnetic-pulse Weapon called Molniya ["Lightning"] which is capable of shutting down Power Sources and Communications anywhere in Europe or America. Its ultimate ...
Baines, Elizabeth
Pseudonym of UK author, playwright and sometime teacher, actor, editor and publisher Helen White (1947- ). Her first novel The Birth Machine (1983; text restored 1996) is dark semi-surrealist sf with ingredients of Feminism, built around an initially conforming citizen stirred to rebel. Baines states that inappropriate editing on its first appearance led her to self-publish a second edition as an "author's cut". The novel ...
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 ...