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Tuesday 15 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.
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Rishi, Farah Naz
(? - ) US author whose first novel, I Hope You Get This Message (2019), reinvokes, with some twists, the traditional Young Adult scenario where a young protagonist (or in this case three friends) must somehow persuade a galactic council of homo sapiens's virtues; species extirpation will be the cost of failure. The message NASA receives from the Interplanetary Affairs Committee representing the ...
Harpur, Patrick
(1950- ) UK author in whose first novel, The Serpent's Circle (1985; vt Serpent's Circle 1985), a secret monastic order called The Little Brothers of the Apostles unleashes its old Religion against the Roman Catholic Church; the Little Brothers, a cohort of Secret Masters, do not themselves reappear in Harpur's work, though a sense of arcane empowerment irradiates his presentation ...
Captain Flash
US Comic (1954-1955). Sterling Comics Inc. Four issues. Artists include Mort Meskin and Mike Sekowsky. 36 pages, with four long strips (three featuring Captain Flash and one Tomboy) and a two page text piece – usually fiction, but in #2 a nonfiction piece on the problems of Rocket-powered Space Flight. / #1 opens with Superhero Captain Flash ...
Wolfe, Gene
(1931-2019) US author, born in New York, raised in Texas, long resident in Illinois. He served in the Korean War; his experiences there, which haunted his depictions of War over the decades of his active career, are recorded in the correspondence with his mother between 1952 and 1954 assembled as Letters Home (coll 1991). He graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston and worked in engineering until becoming an editor of a trade ...
Chaplin, Sid
(1916-1986) UK coal miner and, from 1946, respected author of novels mostly set in the industrial north of England; in his Near Future sf novel, Sam in the Morning (1965), London is dominated – it is an argument typical of modern Horror's take on industrial society – by a sewage company which has used unknown Technology to strip Britain clean 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 ...