SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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. ...
Youmans, Brian
(? - ) US publisher and editor most associated with Small Press magazines. Starting with The Best of the Rest 1990: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy from the Small Press (anth 1991) he has edited, albeit on an extremely relaxed schedule, a series highlighting the eclectic mix of work by both new and established authors whose work was first published in the small press. Stories from ...
Gull, Cyril Ranger
Working name of UK journalist and author Arthur Edward Ranger Gull (1875-1923) who added Cyril to his name at the beginning of his career; moderately prolific under his own name, though he was also well-known under his pseudonym Guy Thorne; he began to publish sf with "The Automaton" in The Ludgate for January 1900 with Reginald Bacchus (1874-1945), one of whose later romans à clef features an identifiable Gull in scandalous situations. It may be because he did indeed lead ...
Hunter, Megan
(1984- ) UK poet and author whose first novel, The End We Start From (2017), sets an intimate story involving childbirth and childcare in straitened circumstances against an increasingly intrusive Near Future backdrop. The protagonist mother's waters breaking, and the rapid flooding of London as systems collapse due to Climate Change, are metaphorically joined ...
Grudova, Camilla
(? - ) Canadian author, in Scotland for some years, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Agata's Machine" in The White Review for June 2015. Much of her early work, whose abrupt surreal destabilizations of normative reality have evoked comparisons with the short stories of both Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, was assembled as The Doll's Alphabet (coll ...
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 ...