SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Media Landscape
The degree to which Communications technology (and foreseeable future extensions of it) was replacing the natural world with a "media landscape" was scarcely noticed until the 1950s. Coined to denote a world dominated by the images of Advertising and the popular arts (among which sf images, especially the iconography of movies and magazine covers, loomed large), the phrase was initially used to describe the obsessions of Pop ...
Harrison, Helga
(1923- ) UK author whose sf novel, The Catacombs (1962), depicts with some irony a Ruined Earth Britain, long after a nuclear World War Three, in which "Crishuns", having persuaded themselves that they warrant special attention, await salvation, while dodging the oppressive Communes, which are governed by a garrulously domineering dictator. [JC]
Galaxy Online
A website, based in Westlake Village, California, which went live as a pilot on 1 January 2000 and was planned by founder Douglas E Conway as "the largest science-fiction and science-fact-related Interactive Online Network in the universe." The backbone of the website was Galaxy Pictures which, according to the press release, had already amassed "the largest library in the world of science-fiction and science-related shows for internet broadcast." Conway based the website on ...
Saadawi, Ahmed
(1973- ) Iraqi screenwriter, poet, documentary film maker and author; he is of sf interest for Farankanstayin fi Baghdad ["Frankenstein in Baghdad"] (2013; trans Jonathan Wright as Frankenstein in Baghdad 2018), set in 2005 during the American occupation of Iraq. A Baghdad merchant sews together the body parts of victims of the violence that spring; this spatchcocked corpse is soon possessed by the recently dead soul of a security guard (see ...
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
(1860-1935) US editor, author and lecturer, and an important figure in the history of US Feminism; daughter of Frederick B Perkins; partner in the 1890s of Adeline Knapp. Although by no means negligible – she published almost 200 short stories plus longer works, many of them inherently interesting – much of her later fiction was clearly shaped to promulgate a copious flow of ...
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 ...