SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Lucas, John
(1966- ) UK author of Faster Than Life (2002), a spoof Space Opera with clear affinities to the work of Douglas Adams. [JC]
Snedeker, Caroline Dale
(1871-1956) US author, initially of children's books, some of them depicting life in versions of New Harmony, the town of her birth being named after the communitarian Utopia New Harmony created by her grandfather Robert Owen (1771-1858). Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community (1917) is a fictionalized (and fantasticated) biography of an experimental Scientist and early resident of New Harmony, Indiana, which had ...
Mars
For a long time Mars seemed to be the most likely abode for life outside the Earth, and for that reason it has always been of cardinal importance in sf. Its surface, unlike that of Venus, exhibits markings that have for a long time been visible (albeit unclearly) with the aid of optical telescopes, and has a distinct red colour. Early observers interpreted what they saw in terms of analogies with terrestrial phenomena: blue-green tracts interrupting the red were ...
New Weird
Term apparently coined by M John Harrison in his introduction to China Miéville's The Tain (2002 chap), titled "China Miéville and the New Weird". It was taken up by Miéville himself in a guest editorial for The Third Alternative (Summer 2003), describing that magazine's general ambience but later understood as a supposed subgenre whose ...
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 ...