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Sunday 19 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 14 July 2026
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Filk
One of the more enduring coinages of Fan Language, this is the short form of "filksong", which in turn originated from the obvious typo in an early-1950s Fanzine article, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music" by Lee Jacobs (intended for the APA SAPS, the Spectator Amateur Press Society, but not actually published there owing to bawdy content). The first ...
Williams, Eric C
(1918-2010) UK author, previously a bookseller and involved with Fandom from the 1930s, publishing some fiction at that time in Fanzines, beginning with the simultaneous appearance of "Mr Hazel's Miracle Carpet" and "The Venus Vein" in Amateur Science Stories for December 1937. He began publishing sf professionally with "The Silent Ship" (July 1965 New Worlds) and ...
Sentinel, The
Videogame (1986; vt The Sentry in the US). Designed by Geoff Crammond. Platforms: C64 (1986); Amstrad, AtariST, BBCMicro, Spectrum (1987); Amiga (1988), DOS (1989). / In The Sentinel, topography is everything. The player adopts the role of a "synthoid", a Robot in a three-dimensional chequerboard landscape overlooked by its eponymous guardian. The Sentinel's gaze slowly scans across ...
Blum, Ralph
(1932-2016) US screenwriter and author involved in early Drug research, which is reflected in his sf novel The Simultaneous Man (1970). A Black convict undergoes, through advanced brainwashing, a Memory Edit that progressively erases his personality, rather as in Alfred Bester's earlier The Demolished Man (January-March 1952 Galaxy; 1953) or Robert ...
Grigsby, Sean
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Eternal H" in Children of the Moon: A Werewolf Anthology (anth 2011) edited by C Bryan Brown. His first novel, Smoke Eaters (2018), though set in the Near Future, features as protagonist a street-wise but weary firefighter worn out after decades of fighting fiery dragons, but called back for a further stand-off; though witty, this ...
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 ...