SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 15 June 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.
Site updated on 15 June 2026
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Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Future Orbits
US professional E-Zine, an Online Magazine only available by subscription and emailed to the subscriber. It was produced by Tom Vander Neut of Hatboro Pennsylvania. It ran for five bimonthly issues from October/November 2001 to June/July 2002. A valiant attempt to produce an online magazine that paid full professional rates and tried to charge subscribers for issues. It did not succeed, but the five issues were still of acceptable ...
Aylett, Steve
(1967- ) UK author who very quickly developed a reputation for his tone of voice, which could be described as gonzo, surreal, metacyberpunkish, riff-driven, surfer-noir; it is a voice which sometimes obscures the objects of his tales, which attack the objects of their Satire through vignettes, quotes and characters from the Pulp magazines and Comics of the previous century. He began ...
Odom, Mel [2]
(1950- ) US artist whose career began in the mid-1970s with erotic illustrations for Blue Boy and Playboy, followed by genre work in Omni and 1980s paperback covers for novels by various authors including Richard Adams, Paul Hazel and other writers of Fantasy, a genre well suited to his distinctive pencil-and-gouache ...
Benchley, Peter
(1940-2006) US author best known for his first novel Jaws (1974), a best-selling tale of a great man-eating shark that terrorizes a seaside resort community; never strictly venturing into the fantastic, it has many effectively timed beats of Horror which were remorselessly amplified in the resulting Monster Movie Jaws (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg and ...
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 ...