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Saturday 14 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
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Threads
Made-for-tv film (1984). BBC-TV. Directed by Mick Jackson. Written by Barry Hines. Cast includes David Brierly, June Broughton, Reece Dinsdale, Karen Meagher, Henry Moxon and Sylvia Stoker. 115 minutes. Colour. / This BBC production, at once a UK equivalent of The Day After (1983) and an attempt to update the harrowing vision of Peter Watkins's The War Game ...
Narlikar, Jayant V
(1938-2025) Indian mathematician and astrophysicist who was tutored by and was eventually a colleague of Sir Fred Hoyle, with whom he developed what became known as the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of Gravity in what turned out to be a doomed effort to reconcile the physics of gravity with the steady-state model of the universe – as opposed to the Big Bang theory (see Cosmology) now more or less ...
Hardy, David A
(1936- ) UK artist and illustrator, known at least as much for his astronomical and space-exploration paintings, done in the accurate tradition of Chesley Bonestell, as for his sf work. Hardy is essentially a self-taught artist, though he attended the Margaret Street College of Art in Birmingham circa 1960 on day release from his illustration work for the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury, during which employment he honed his ...
Amobi, Chino
(1984- ) US musician, author and artist, of Nigerian descent, best known for his politically engaged, maximalist electronic music collages, and as co-founder of the short-lived but influential record label and musicians' collective NON Worldwide. His ongoing project Eroica takes various forms across different media, beginning with the Near-Future, Cyberpunk-inflected novel Eroica (2020), ...
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 ...