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Saturday 11 July 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 7 July 2026
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Hekking, Avis
(1878-1945) US author – she may have been born while her parents were temporarily in Europe – resident in UK at some point, perhaps permanently; of her works, A King of Mars (1908) is of interest for its depiction of life on Mars, which is moderately advanced, with advanced Airships; Communications are soon established between Mars and Earth, via a small globe which contains ...
Chilton, H Herman
(1863-1945) Belgian-born UK author, whose first sf novel, Woman Unsexed (1892), melodramatically depicts a 1925 world ruined by women's right to work; The Ways of June (1925) places a conventional love story into a world characterized by Inventions such as vertical-takeoff airplanes; The Lost Children (1931) visits the Lost World to which the children of Hamelin followed the Pied Piper, ...
Organlegging
A virtually self-defining sf term based on "bootlegging" and denoting the illicit acquisition of and dealing in human organs and other bodily parts. It was coined by Larry Niven in early stories of his Known Space series, in particular those collected in The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (coll 1976), beginning with "The Organleggers" (January 1969 Galaxy; vt "Death by Ecstasy" in The Shape of Space, coll ...
Paton Walsh, Jill
(1937-2020) UK author, partner from the early 1970s of John Rowe Townsend; they were married from 2004 until his death in 2014. Much of her fiction was for Young Adult readers; she also wrote several nonfantastic detective novels [not listed below] including the Imogen Quy series set in a fictional University of Cambridge college, and four authorized Sequels by Another Hand ...
Wood, N Lee
(1955- ) US author, married to Norman Spinrad (1990-2005); she began to publish work of genre interest with "Molly Haskowin" in Sworn Allies (anth 1995) edited by David Drake and Bill Fawcett. Her first novel, Looking for the Mahdi (1996), is a Near Future thriller which en passant interrogates ...
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 ...