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Friday 13 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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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Greer, Richard
Joint pseudonym of Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg used for the stories "The Great Kladnar Race" (December 1956 Amazing) and "The Secret of the Shan" (June 1957 Fantastic). According to Silverberg the earlier Greer story "Calling Captain Flint" (August 1956 Amazing Stories) is by Garrett alone. [PN/DRL] links / ...
Butler, Robert Olen
(1945- ) US author, much of whose work intensively capitalizes on his experience in the American Army Military Intelligence in Vietnam 1969 to 1972, when he learned to speak Vietnamese. Countrymen of Bones (1983) offers, just short of literal Fantastika, some analogies between an archaeological mystery and nuclear tests. The Christopher Marlowe Cobb sequence, depicting the adventures of a secret agent up to and into ...
Madsen, David
(1929- ) US author whose nonfantastic (but exorbitant) Black Plume: The Suppressed Memoirs of Edgar Allan Poe (1980) offers inter alia some illuminating analysis of the laboriously tortured psyche of a central early figure in the creation of American sf (see Edgar Allan Poe). Of direct sf interest is U.S.S.A. (1989), a noir tale featuring an ex-CIA agent investigating an explosive murder in ...
Lerangis, Peter
(1955- ) US actor and author, who also writes as by A L Singer. His earliest books were Ties for the Hardy Boys Juvenile Series; much of his work since has been similarly directed to the Young Adult market, including his sf and fantasy, typical of which are his three titles for the Byron Preiss Time Machine ...
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 ...