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Thursday 19 February 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.
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Wilson, Gahan
(1930-2019) American artist and author, best known for his work outside the genre as a cartoonist, his career beginning in the mid-1940s; associated mainly for many decades with such Slick magazines as Playboy (from 1957) and The New Yorker (from 1980). The bizarre and often macabre sense of Humour he displayed in his innumerable cartoons, though influenced by such precursors as Charles ...
Calkins, Dick
Working name of US Comic-strip illustrator Richard T Calkins (1894-1962), who was born in Grand Rapids and studied at the Art Institute in Chicago. Beginning in 1929, Philip Francis Nowlan scripted and Calkins illustrated Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a comic strip based on Nowlan's "Armageddon – 2419 A.D." (August 1928 Amazing) and "The ...
Millar, Martin
(1956- ) Scottish author whose first novel, Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation (1987), is a gonzo depiction of downmarket countercultural life in 1980s Britain, edging close to the fantastic in its depiction of intersections between Comics, Drugs and Videogames; it does not, however quite venture over the borderline. Lux the Poet (1988), set in a very similar ...
America's Greatest Comics
US Comic (1941-1943). Fawcett Publications. 8 issues. Artists include Phil Bard, C. C. Beck, Tom McNamara and Mac Raboy. Script writers include Otto Binder (see Eando Binder) and Tom McNamara. 100 pages, comprising five or six long strips and a short text story, plus short strips (fiction and non-fiction) as filler. / #1 opens with Captain Marvel: when radio reporter Billy Batson says "SHAZAM" ...
Gibbons, Stella
(1902-1989) UK journalist, poet and author, active from the early 1920s. Perhaps unfairly, she remains known almost exclusively for her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), set in a moderately explicit Near Future, sometime after the 1946 Anglo-Nicaraguan War, when public Videophones and private aeroplanes are common. The story itself, a savagely comic Parody of epiphany-choked rural novels ...
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 ...