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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
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Francis, Francis
Working name of George Frederick Wimbledon Francis (1865-? ), UK author of two novels with some genre interest: Eternal Enmity (1892 2vols), a complex supernatural thriller, and Mother of Gold (1931), a Lost Race tale set in Mexico, where a scientifically advanced civilization of Ulmecs is discovered. [JC]
Train, Arthur
(1875-1945) US author and lawyer, best known for work outside the sf field, particularly his legal series about the lawyer Ephraim Tutt. Some of the stories assembled in Mortmain (coll 1907) – including the title story, "Mortmain" (2 June 1906 Saturday Evening Post), in the magazine where most of his fiction first appeared – verge on sf. In the first volume of Benjamin Hooker sequence, ...
Red Shirts
An initially joky but now often seriously used item of critical Terminology, based on fans' frequent observation that red-shirted security officers in the original Star Trek (1966-1969) tended to be rather quickly killed off. Thus a red shirt, or redshirt, is an expendable spear-carrier who does not survive for long. As with virtually every aspect of Star Trek, this trope is sent up in ...
White, Tim
Working name of British artist Timothy Don White (1952-2020). After artistic training at the Medway College of Design from 1968 to 1972, White worked in advertising for two years before receiving assignments to paint book covers for (principally) New English Library and Science Fiction Monthly; his first commission was for the 1974 Transworld/Corgi SF Collector's Library paperback of The Other Side of the Sky (coll 1958) by Arthur C ...
Superman: The Animated Series
Animated tv series (1996-2000). Warner Brothers Animation for The WB Network. Produced by Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Bruce W Timm, and Glen Murakami. Based on characters created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. Directors included Curt Geda, Dan Riba, Toshibika Masuda, and many others. Writers included Dini, Hilary J Bader, Burnett, Mark Evanier, Timm, and others. Cast includes Tim Daly, Dana Delany, George Dzundza and David ...
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 ...