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Tuesday 15 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2025
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Big Dumb Objects
A jocular though affectionate piece of sf Terminology which seems to have been coined by Roz Kaveney in her retrospective essay "Science Fiction in the 1970s" (June 1981 Foundation), with specific reference to the titular Macrostructure of Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970). The term became ...
Morgan, Richard
(1965- ) British author who began publishing work of genre interest with Altered Carbon (2002) as by Richard K Morgan; the middle initial also appears on US reprints. Altered Carbon was the first of a three-volume sequence featuring the mercenary/detective Takeshi Kovacs, subsequent books being Broken Angels (2003) and Woken Furies (2005). The setting of the Kovacs sequence is a United Nations-supervised group of ...
Carter, Lauren
(1972- ) Canadian author whose first novel, the Near-Future Dystopian Swarm (2013), which is set at a time after fossil fuels have finally been depleted, follows its protagonist on a dangerous hegira into a ruined City for provender; her return to something like primordial wilderness, which in some narrative traditions might signal the ...
Cawdron, Peter
(1967- ) New Zealand-born author, in Australia for many years, whose early novels, beginning with The Road to Hell (2011 ebook), seem usually to have been self-published until the teens of the twenty-first century, most of his stories being Space Operas heavy on action, often involving First Contact. An early example, Anomaly (2011), which is set on Earth, involves the arrival ...
Bernard, Rafe
Secondary pseudonym of UK author Reginald Alec Martin (1908-1971), better known for his Children's SF written as by E C Eliott (whom see for full entry). He used Bernard for an sf novel, The Wheel in the Sky (1954), which datedly concerns itself with the construction of a pre-NASA-style, privately financed Space Station, and for an Invaders ...
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 ...