SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 July 2026
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 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Seymour, Cyril
Pseudonym of UK author William Robinson (1852-1926), whose The Magic of Tomorrow: Being the Strange True Story of One Who Claimed Foreknowledge of the Day That Never Comes (1903), despite its title, is a nonfantastic tale of the fake who only claims foreknowledge; of some sf interest is Comet Chaos: A Romance of Love, Treasure and Prophecy (1906), a confused tale of treasure-hunting set in an advanced submarine (see Inventions; ...
Tarde, Gabriel
Writing name of French sociologist Jean Gabriel de Tarde (1843-1904), whose investigations into the psychology of crowds, focusing on minute (and, as it were, epidemic) interactions among individuals defined through their membership in a group, only became influential after about 1950. His prescient sense of the nature of a twentieth-century world consumed by "progress" is eloquently manifest in La Psychologie économique ["Economic Psychology"] (1902 2vols), as first ...
Minor, Wendell
(1944- ) US artist, author and illustrator, initially in association with Paul Bacon, whose concern and hands-on responsibility for typography he shares; his first covers date from 1968. The intensely enhanced Magic Realism of his work, much of it depicting rural America, has been influential from the 1970s. In contrast to the overdetermined populousness of the work of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), his works ...
Motta, Luigi
(1881-1955) Italian author, prolific for many years, beginning with several tales in collaboration with the already famous Emilio Salgari (1862-1911). Much of Motta's sf output is not identified here, though La Principessa delle rose (1911; trans William Collinge as The Princess of the Roses 1919) gained some English-language readers for its Prediction of World War One, which he describes in grim ...
Purple Claw, The
US Comic (1953). Minoan Publishing Corp. 3 issues. Artists include Ben Brown and David Gantz. Script writers include Charles Kuhn. 36 pages per issue, with three long strips (all featuring Dr Weir with the Purple Claw), a short text story and 1-2 short strips (some non-fiction). / Dr Jonathan Weir is severely injured when his plane crashes in an African jungle, but is cured by a local witch doctor using the purple claw, which is worn like a gauntlet; his ...
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 ...