SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
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 ...
Walton, David
(1975- ) US physicist and author who has claimed that his Christian faith infuses but does not direct the arguments made in the Hard SF novels he has published to date; he has clearly distinguished between the theological truth of the Bible (for Christians) and the culture-bound language which seems to contradict a modern science, for instance the theory of Evolution. Walton began to publish work of genre interest ...
Notes on Content
The notes below, from the 1993 second edition, are largely unrevised. In general we have been able to relax many constraints previously forced on us by the space limitations of a single printed volume. Some authors of short stories only, like Vance Aandahl, appeared in the first edition, were cut to save space in the second and are now restored; there are similar cases among print magazines not exclusively devoted to sf but of considerable sf interest, such ...
Greenfield, Susan
(1950- ) UK neuroscientist, broadcaster, entrepreneur and author, publishing from around 1970 at least 200 technical papers, mostly focused on brain research, as particularly directed to Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Her first novel, 2121: A Tale from the Next Century (2013), has some of the narrative clarity (and from contemporary eyes didactic dryness) of her two most vivid models, Aldous Huxley's ...
Bakker, R Scott
(1967- ) Canadian author whose early work was Fantasy, but who has more recently published some sf work. The complex ongoing fantasy enterprise – which, under the overall title of The Second Apocalypse, comprises two series, the Prince of Nothing sequence beginning with The Darkness That Comes Before (2003) and the Aspect-Emperor sequence beginning with The Judging Eye (2008) – ...
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 ...