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Friday 20 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Duncan, Alexandra
(? - ) US author, resident in North Carolina, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Kinderkochen" in Ravens in the Library: Magic in the Bard's Name (anth 2009) edited by Sandra Buskirk and Phil (as SatyrPhil) Brucato. Her Young Adult Salvage Universe sequence opens with Salvage (2014), an adventure beginning in a Far-Future ...
Downing, Charles
(? -? ) US author in whose Near Future tale, The Reckoning (1927), the Japanese Invasion by air of California (see Yellow Peril) causes the destruction of Los Angeles. Full-scale War then begins. [JC]
Wollheim, Donald A
(1914-1990) US editor and author, and one of the first and most vociferous sf fans; with Forrest J Ackerman, Wollheim was perhaps the most dynamic member of the embryo Fandom of the 1930s. A lifetime resident of New York City, he published innumerable Fanzines, was co-editor of the early semiprozine Fanciful Tales of Time and Space in 1936, founded ...
Bornefeld, William
(? - ) US author whose sf novel, Time and Light (1996) depicts a Dystopian post-holocaust society in which all visual arts are forbidden, and the population is required to ingest daily a pharmacopoeia of Drugs which combine the effects of Viagra and Prozac and more; the protagonist discovers a horde of forbidden photographs from the twentieth century, which stirs his mind and leads to ...
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 ...