SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 5 June 2023
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.
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Symonds, John
(1914-2006) UK playwright and author best known for his studies of Aleister Crowley, in particular The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley (1951; rev 1971); he served as Crowley's literary executor. He is however more significant for his fiction, beginning with William Waste (1947), most notable perhaps for its innocent but wily protagonist's encounter with a wax Doll in a great glass case who turns out to be alive [for Aleister Crowley, Dolls and more ...
Kip, Leonard
(1826-1906) US lawyer and author, much of whose work reflects his experiences in the California Gold Rush of 1849; though some of his novels contain trace elements of the supernatural, he is of interest here mainly for Hannibal's Man (1873 chap), a Sleeper Awakes tale in which a truculent Carthaginian is aroused from a glacier, which is included in Hannibal's Man and other Tales: The Argus Christmas Stories (coll 1878). Along with ...
Sibson, Francis H
(1899-1972) UK-born journalist and author, in South Africa from 1914 or earlier; most of his work, most of which appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, consisted of technically proficient tales involving aeroplanes or the sea and ships. The Survivors sequence comprising The Survivors (1932) and The Stolen Continent (1934) describes first the Near Future volcanic creation of a new Island in the ...
Bennett, Gary L
(1940- ) US physicist and author, author of at least two technical papers in collaboration with Robert L Forward, and of many pieces attacking American fundamentalism in its attempts to dismantle Evolutionary science; his sf novel, The Star Sailors (1980), deals with the conflict between a peaceful galactic civilization which is threatened by another, divisive galactic culture. ...
Ralph, James
(1695-1762) American-born historian, controversialist and author, in UK from 1724; his Satirical play, The Astrologer (1744 chap) – remotely based on the mistaken-doubles comedy, Albumazar (1615), by Thomas Tomkis (circa 1580-1634) – targets the tropes and lunacies of what we now call Proto SF, as conveyed through its fatuous protagonists' attempts to make sense of the vision of ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...