SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Harris, Frank
Working name of Irish-born UK editor, entrepreneur, playwright and author James Thomas Harris (1856-1931), who early in his life became a lawyer in the USA, but was back in the UK by 1875, using his working name from this point; he left the UK for good at the beginning of World War One. During his lifetime, he was famous for his extremely loud voice, his sexual exploits, and for general roguery; he is now best known for his erotic autobiography, My Life and Loves (1922-1927), ...
Wells, Martha
(1964- ) US author most of whose career has been dedicated to fantasy [a highly selected Checklist appears below], beginning with the Ile-Rien sequence whose first volume, The Element of Fire (1993; rev 2006), applies some tropes from the Fantasy of Manners toolkit [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] to colour in a tale of Magic. The second ...
Cheney, Frank J
(1851-1919) US businessman and author whose first book, A Life of Unity and Other Stories (coll 1901), contains some fantasies. He is of sf interest for Ten Thousand Years Hence or 19002 of the Christian Era (1909), whose contemporary protagonist, the richest man in the world, finds himself transported (perhaps by Time Machine) to an Island ten millennia hence. Its inhabitants of the ...
Fantasy Fiction
1. US Digest-size magazine. Two issues, May and November 1950, published by Magabook, edited by Curtis Mitchell. "Old and New Fantasy Stories but Always the Best" was the slogan of this short-lived magazine, whose stories were largely reprinted from general Pulps of the 1930s and early 1940s. It also offered prizes for reports of true fantastic experiences and haunted houses. #2 was retitled Fantasy Stories, carried a lengthy ...
Palmer, Jane
(1946- ) UK author and illustrator who began writing sf with the Moosevan sequence – comprising The Planet Dweller (1985), Moving Moosevan (1990), Duckbill Soup (2011) and Brassica Park (2018) – which presents a comic set of Parodies of sf Clichés as the giant Shapeshifting ...
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 ...