SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 6 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Wartofsky, Victor
(1931-2003) US author whose very Near Future Year of the Yahoo (1972) is of some sf interest for its explorations of potential Political extremities in the governance of America; in The Passage (1980), a volunteer at the Psychical Research Institute experimentally explores the afterlife. [JC]
Ball, Frank P
(1908-1970) US solicitor, publisher and author whose self-published Utopia, My Wondrous Dream (1923), may be set in Atlantis, as its protagonist falls asleep while reading Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), though his adventures soon depart radically from any Donnellian hypothesis, taking off from Jonathan ...
Ladd, Fred
Working name of film and television animator Fred Laderman (1927-2021), known for being among the first to bring Japanese Anime to North America by combining animated and documentary material from overseas with domestic library footage. The Space Explorers (1957) and New Adventures of the Space Explorers (1959) were based largely on Soviet films, including Space Documentaries and the animated sf film ...
Agriculture
It is not a subject that naturally lends itself to dramatic storytelling, but agriculture is nonetheless the activity that has long been the primary source of food for humans, and it will likely remain essential, in one form or another, in the future. Thus, some sf writers who look beyond heroic adventures to more broadly consider the future fate of humanity have addressed this mundane but vital profession. Sf stories about agriculture can be roughly categorized as follows: depictions 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, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...