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Friday 18 April 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.
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Pares, Bip
Working name of UK illustrator Ethel Pares (1904-1977); the "Bip" came from her childhood attempt to pronounce the name of a family horse. Most of her circa 600 covers were done before World War Two, often for works of genre interest: much of this work continues to await discovery. Some of her best work appeared on the covers of sf novels, such as E Phillips Oppenheim's The Dumb Gods Speak (1937) and the same author's ...
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Videogame (2011). BioWare. Designed by James Ohlen, Emmanuel Lusinchi, Brad Prince, Daniel Erickson. Platforms: Win. / After it became clear that Star Wars: Galaxies (2003) would not be a commercial success, and since it was generally believed that the causes of that game's failure could be found in its design or implementation rather than in the intellectual property from which it was licenced, a decision ...
Hall, Sandi
(? - ) UK-born author, journalist and feminist activist, resident variously in Canada, Zambia, New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Mexico. In New Zealand she belonged to the "Broadsheet" collective, founded the NZ Women's Party, and publicly announced her lesbianism. In the Near-Future The Godmothers (1982), her first novel, two groups of women in a well-realized ...
Fearing, Kenneth
(1902-1961) US poet and author, who supported himself in early years in part by writing softcore pornography as by Kirk Wolff, and whose early renown as a poet faded perceptibly even before his death; he is now known mainly for mysteries like The Big Clock (1946), a tale whose atmosphere adumbrates the film-noir tonality of later US fantasy. Fearing's only sf novel proper is Clark Gifford's Body (1942), which gravely and literately portrays a ...
Venus
Because Earth's inner neighbour presented a bright and featureless face to early astronomers, it became something of a mystery planet. Nineteenth-century astronomers and early-twentieth-century sf writers generally imagined that, as the featureless face was a permanent cloud layer, the surface beneath must be warm and wet; the Venus of the imagination became a planet of vast oceans (perhaps with no land at all) or sweltering jungles. In the 1960s, however, probes revealed that Venus has no ...
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 ...