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Friday 11 July 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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Pardio
Pseudonym of UK author John Nott Pyke-Nott (1841-1923), author of a book-length poem, The White Africans (1879 chap; exp rev 1883), which narrates the discovery of an ancient Lost Race of whites in the mountains of Africa; it is an early example of the form. [JC]
Lawrence, Mark
(1968- ) US-born author mostly in the UK from infancy, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Climb" in O G's Speculative Fiction for 2007; most of his work has been fantasy, including the violent and dark-hued Broken Universe sequence beginning with Prince of Thorns (2011). The Ancestor sequence beginning with Red Sister (2017) takes the form of a Planetary Romance set on ...
Wearmouth, Darren A
(? - ) UK author with his brother Marcus Wearmouth of the Activation sequence of Near Future post-Disaster thrillers beginning with First Activation (2011), set initially in a New York dominated by Zombie-like minions of a tyrannical organization bent on reshaping America. Protagonist duties are shared by two ...
Zombies
Of the three chief classes of Supernatural Creature most popular in fantastic fiction – the others being Vampires and Werewolves – zombies seem the least supernatural and the most easily rationalized in sf terms, though at its origin the term clearly described an entirely supernatural entity, and was so understood in the late nineteenth century, when it was used by such authors as ...
McCutcheon, George Barr
(1866-1928) US author whose Graustark sequence of tales set in a Balkan Ruritania – beginning with Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne (1901) and ending with The Inn of the Hawk and Raven: A Tale of Old Graustark (1927) – erects an edifice of nostalgia and modestly defiant enclosedness almost as powerful as that created in the actual Ruritanian novels of Anthony Hope. But ...
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 ...