SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 March 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 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Stevenson, D E
(1892-1973) Scottish author of many romances and other works. Her only sf is The Empty World (A Romance of the Future) (1936; vt A World in Spell 1939), a Scientific Romance in which, after a Holocaust – in this case a Comet strike – has eliminated almost the whole of humanity; a small group of survivors must work out how to cope with their ...
Crowcroft, Peter
(1925-1982) UK actor and author in the US from 1963 – reportedly very prolific under a number of unrevealed pseudonyms – whose The Fallen Sky (1954) describes a Post-Holocaust London in which a sociologist lives a Last Man existence under barbarous conditions, attempting to cure himself of violence and finding – through his discovery of a tribe of blind children, one of ...
Morris, William
(1834-1896) UK designer, artist, publisher, poet and author whose greatest fame rests on his work as a designer of furniture and fabrics; his efforts to reform the prevalent vulgarity of mid-Victorian taste and to preserve standards of craftsmanship placed him in radical and irresolvable conflict with the basic tendencies of the industrial era, then in the first vigour of its youth. This conflict was variously expressed in his writing. In his early poems, collected in ...
Sutherland, James
(1900-1996) Scottish academic and author whose Parody of the Fantastic Voyage genre, The Narrative of Jasper Weeple: Being an Account of his Strange Journey to the Land of Midanglia, and of all that Happened to him in that Country (1930), describes the discovery of a medieval Utopian Lost Race in the heart of contemporary England. Midanglia, a benevolent ...
Smith, J F
(1806-1890) UK author active from around 1830, very popular in the mid-nineteenth century though he died forgotten. The Chronicles of Stanfield Hall: The Young Chevalier; Or, the Wars of the Guelphs and Stuarts (1849-1850 London Journal; 1851; vt Stanfield Hall 1888-1889 3vols), published initially feuilleton-style in 59 weekly parts, inserts a range of Inventions into an historical melodrama (which itself ranges from the ...
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 ...