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Wednesday 11 February 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.
Site updated on 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Sociology
Sociology is the systematic study of society and social relationships. The word was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was then that the first attempts were made to divorce studies of society employing the scientific method, on the one hand, from dogmatic political and ethical presuppositions, on the other. Social studies in a more general sense have, of course, a much longer history, going back to Plato. Sociology and sf have a ...
Seabrook, Jack
(? - ) Author and critic whose books of genre relevance are studies of Fredric Brown and Jack Finney, respectively Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown (1993) and Stealing Through Time: On the Writings of Jack Finney (2006). [DRL] /
Johnstone, William W
(1938-2004) US author identified as the author of over 170 novels since his first in 1980, a few of these being as by William Mason; titles after circa 2003 were seemingly written in collaboration; after his death, his name may have been used as a House Name, though more recently the Johnstone series were taken over by J A Johnstone, writing either as in collaboration with Johnstone, or solo. Johnstone was initially best known for ...
Reynardson, H Birch
(1892-1972) UK author, in active service during World War One; as Henry Thomas Birch-Reynardson, he published a war memoir, Mesopotamia 1914-15 (1919). He is of sf interest for Black Coffee (1928), a Lost Race tale whose protagonists search up the Amazon River for the source of a Drug with the ability to restore Memory of previous lives (see ...
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 ...