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
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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 ...
Thing, The [comic]
US Comic (1952-1954). 17 issues. Charlton Comics. Artists include John Belfi, Steve Ditko and Bob Forgione. Script writers include Carl Memling. 36 pages. 4-5 long strips and a short text story per issue, often with 1-2 short filler strips. / This comic contains "weird tales of suspense and Horror" introduced by an unseen narrator named The Thing; sf ...
McKeag, Ernest L
(1896-1974) UK author, in active service during World War One, who began writing boys' fiction in 1921, some of it featuring the occasional sf McGuffin and several Lost Worlds. In his later career he published many non-sf novels under the House Name "Griff". The Lost City of the Sierras (1927 chap) is a ...
Presslie, Robert
(1920-2000) UK author who worked as a pharmacy manager in London; he is remembered for readable and occasionally memorable short fiction on conventional Genre SF themes. His first sale was "Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted" in Authentic for June 1955. Presslie was notably prolific in the late 1950s, twice achieving the feat of simultaneous publication in three major UK magazines: ...
Erickson, Steve
Working name of US author Stephen Michael Erickson (1950- ), active as a journalist for some years before his first novel, Days Between Stations (1985), quickly established his reputation as an author of dark, journey-haunted, surreal Fabulations about the USA and the twentieth century. Labyrinthine figurations of apocalypse dominate his grey and hyperbolic landscapes; but a powerful sense of geography, notable also in the ...
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 ...