SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 7 June 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 2 June 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Dixon, Thomas, Jr
(1864-1946) US Baptist minister and author whose The Fall of a Nation: A Sequel to The Birth of a Nation (1915-1916 National Sunday Magazine; 1916) graphically depicts the Near Future Invasion and conquest of the USA by the Imperial Confederation of Europe, dominated by Germany. After years of occupation, a singularly ferocious US womanhood helps the men of the USA expel the enemy. The subtitle refers to the film ...
Buckner, Robert
(1906-1989) US journalist, screenwriter, producer and author of one sf novel, Starfire (19 March-2 April 1960 Saturday Evening Post as "Moon Pilot"; 1960; vt Moon Pilot 1962). This deals with the misadventures of a US astronaut scheduled for the first ever manned Space Flight to the Moon; it was filmed by Disney as Moon Pilot ...
Vale, Rena
(1898-1983) US scriptwriter, active in the Communist Party until 1938, later an investigator for the California State Assembly Committee on Un-American Activities, and author who began publishing sf with the novella The Shining City (May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly; 2012 dos), and with her first novel, The Red Court [for subtitle see Checklist] (1952), whose negative analysis of Communism and its planned takeover of ...
Lambert, Derek
(1929-2001) UK journalist and author who specialized in political thrillers, and, writing as Richard Falkirk, in the nonfantastic Bow Street Runner sequence of proto-policiers set in the early nineteenth century. He is of sf interest for The Memory Man (1979) whose protagonist, after coming to life after death (see Reincarnation), feels he has found a land to explore; and for The Red Dove (1982), a ...
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 ...