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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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Seymour, Alan [2]
(1927-2015) Australian playwright, broadcaster and author, resident in the UK and elsewhere between 1961 and 1995. His sf novel, The Coming Self-Destruction of the United States of America (1969) – presented as a series of manuscripts found ages hence in the ruins of America (see Ruins and Futurity) and delivered back through time for contemporary readers – features a Black revolution that, though temporarily successful, ...
Clouston, J Storer
(1870-1944) Scottish magistrate and author, in Orkney from around 1903, best-known for such humorous work as the Lunatic series of spoof adventures beginning with The Lunatic at Large (1899), all nonfantastic [not listed in Checklist below]. He began writing works of genre interest with Vandrad the Viking; or, the Feud and the Spell (dated 1898 but 1897), a Fantasy involving seers and curses. The Prodigal Father (1909) ...
William, Eli K P
(? - ) Canadian translator and author, in Japan from early adulthood, who is of sf interest for the Jubilee Cycle sequence beginning with Car Crash Jubilee (2015 ebook), set in a Dystopian Cyberpunk-inflected Near Future Tokyo, where the harvesting of individual transactions with the world (see ...
Norway
Norway, along with the other Scandinavian countries, has always been somewhat isolated from the main roads of European cultural development, and never more so than during the eighteenth century, when the Age of Enlightenment swept across the rest of Europe. Outside the mainly French-speaking courts, Scandinavia was poor and starving, mainly agricultural, and crushed by repeated, ruinous wars. It is perhaps not surprising that excursions into fantastic literature were few: Scandinavia had ...
Hile, William H
(1869-1943) US geologist, entrepreneur – he founded the African Ostrich Farm and Feather Company in 1909 to sell ostrich products, profits (which proved to be as scarce as hens' teeth) to be shared with its African suppliers – and author of a Lost Race novel, The Ostrich for the Defense (1912), set in the heart of Asia Minor, where a white queen named Zar rules a benign Utopia on lines enhancing social ...
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 ...