SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 15 December 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 11 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Flint, James
(1968- ) UK editor and author whose first novel, Habitus (1998) Equipoisally hovers amongst various readings of reality, though its human protagonists' gradual (and increasingly gnostic) intoxication with a world defined by the conduits of information that control is less and less amenable to a mimetic reading, certainly as the main mediating consciousness of the book is a dog in orbit. 52 Ways to Magic America ...
Avatar
Film (2009). Twentieth Century Fox in association with Dune Entertainment and Ingenious Film Partners present a Lightstorm Entertainment production. Written and directed by James Cameron. Cast includes Stephen Lang, Joel David Moore, Giovanni Ribisi, Michelle Rodriguez, Zoë Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington. Original version 162 minutes; 2010 Special Edition 170 minutes. Colour, 3D. / Cameron's first science fiction film since ...
Johnson, Les
(? - ) US physicist with a master's degree from Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee), futurist (see Futures Studies), NASA space technologist and author who began to publish fiction of genre interest with Back to the Moon (2010) with Travis S Taylor, opening the Hard SF Space Excursions sequence continued in ...
Chambers, Becky
(1985- ) US-born author – now living in Reykjavik, Iceland – and Videogame columnist for The Mary Sue website, who has also written nonfiction for Tor.com and whose sf debut was the thoughtfully romantic Space Opera The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014). This, after becoming the first self-published novel to be shortlisted for a ...
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 ...