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Saturday 11 April 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.
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Arbuthnot, John
(1667-1735) Scots physician (to Queen Anne and her royal family), mathematician, author and Satirist, a member of the Royal Society that was mocked by his friend Jonathan Swift in the third book of Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735); Arbuthnot is thought to have amiably provided suggestions and hints to improve this extended Parody, while preferring not to receive credit. His own ...
Whitaker, David
(1928-1980) UK Television scriptwriter and editor who as the first story editor of Doctor Who oversaw the writing of this series' first 51 episodes (1963-1964) and contributed several scripts of his own in the mid- to late 1960s. Whitaker wrote the first Doctor Who novelization, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964; vt Doctor Who and the Daleks 1973). This well-crafted ...
Galouye, Daniel F
(1920-1976) US author who was born and died in New Orleans, Louisiana; a naval test pilot during World War Two, he subsequently worked as a journalist, though the delayed effect of war injuries forced him to retire in 1967. He had begun to publish sf with "Rebirth" in Imagination for March 1952, and appeared frequently in the magazines for about a decade with such tales as "Tonight the Sky Will Fall!" (May 1952 Imagination) and ...
Biemiller, Carl L
(1912-1979) US businessman, journalist and author, of sf interest for his two series of novels for older children: the Jonny sequence comprising The Magic Ball from Mars (1953) and Starboy (1956); and, more interestingly, the Post-Holocaust Hydronauts sequence – The Hydronauts (1970), Follow the Whales: The Hydronauts Meet the Otter People (1973) and Escape from the Crater ...
Whiteside, Thomas
(1918-1997) UK-born journalist and author, in USA most of his life; most of his work, like The Tunnel Under the Channel (1972), is nonfiction. Much of this is focused on Ecological issues, as in Defoliation: What Are Our Herbicides Doing to Us? (1970). He is of sf interest for the Near Future novel Alone Through the Dark Sea (1964), in which three narratives interweave, each based on isolation: ...
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 ...