SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Kenneth-Brown, Kenneth
Working name of US journalist and author Kenneth Brown (1868-? ), some of whose work was set in a romanticized Orient; his Young Adult sf novel, Two Boys in a Gyrocar: The Story of a New York to Paris Motor Race (1911), on the other hand, stays closer to home, depicting a Near Future aerial contest whose young protagonists' Invention allows them to traverse the Atlantic ...
Gamebook
Term used to describe printed works of fiction in which different paths can be followed through the story, leading to multiple endings, and in which some outcomes are considered superior to others, allowing for the possibility of "winning" or "losing" the book. The word itself was apparently coined by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982) (see ...
Dinosaurs
Our cultural fascination with the great lizards of prehuman Earth has inevitably led to much sf in which – as never in history – humans encounter living dinosaurs. This may take place in Prehistoric SF set in an anachronistic deep past, as in In the Morning of Time (coll of linked stories 1919) by Charles G D Roberts. A modern enclave of surviving dinosaurs is somewhat less risible. This ...
Satifka, Erica L
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Automatic" in Clarkesworld for January 2007, set like much of her short work in a Dystopian urban Near Future populated by outlier figures, some of them modified humans, some of them artifacts. How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters (coll 2021) generously represents this ...
Smith, Stef
(? - ) Scottish playwright, several of whose plays edge into the fantastic, including Human Animals (performed 2016; 2016), where the Ecological crises created by Homo sapiens are seen through an unconcerted but threatening Invasion of urban areas by wildlife. Of more direct sf interest is Girl in the Machine (performed 2017; 2017), in which mandatory ...
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 ...