SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
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Abbey, Edward
(1927-1989) US author, known equally for his controversial nonfiction studies of the ruining of the American West, and for the novels, written late in his career, jeremiads about the future of our planet that – at times melodramatically – advocate a form of armed resistance against the corporate buy-out of the world. The most famous of these late books, all of which may be thought of as Westerns, is The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975; rev ...
Vlahos, Len
(? - ) US rock musician, bookseller and author of Young Adult tales, initially nonfantastic. He is of sf interest for his fourth novel, Hard Wired (2020), the first-person confession of an AI from the point "he" becomes aware of his nature at the age of ten; after running through his invented past, he more or less takes over the Internet, applying his vast ...
Psychohistory
A much-loved item of sf Terminology, coined in Isaac Asimov's very popular sequence Foundation (May 1942-January 1950 Astounding; fixups 1951-1953); it should not be confused with the identical term sometimes used by historians, which refers to the study of the relation of psychological motives to historical process. The attractive but purely ...
Woodcock, John
(1927-2017) UK painter and illustrator, active from around 1945; the colour-dense blocks and patterns of his work usually unpack into symbolic but moderately telling representation; it may seem surprising – given his continuing activity until near his death – that he did not publish more prolifically. All the same he produced covers for several authors with entries in this encyclopedia, including Jocelyn Brooke, Susan ...
Kerman, Judith
(1945- ) US translator, publisher, academic, anthologist and poet (see Poetry), active from the 1970s; academic work is usually signed Judith B Kerman. Her poetry might be described as generally comprising personalized takes on tropes of the fantastic, with the teller of the poem, usually presented in a moderately fantasticated first person, governing the outcome. Her anthology Uncommonplaces: Poems of the Fantastic (anth 2000) ...
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 ...