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Friday 16 October 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.
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Bounds, Sydney J
(1920-2006) UK author, active in various fields from the late 1940s, who published his first Horror fantasy, "Strange Portrait", in the sole issue of Outlands dated Winter 1946. Some early short Space Opera in Authentic and New Worlds appeared 1953-1955 as by George C Duncan. He built a considerable and well-respected ...
Wooding, Chris
(1977- ) UK author, usually for the Young Adult market, and usually fantasy or horror, including his first novel, Catchman (1998). His most successful singleton is probably The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray (2001), whose Amnesia-ridden protagonist possesses unknowingly the key to understanding a post-Pandemic crime-ridden London ...
Nuclear Energy
The claim that sf is a realistic, extrapolative literature is often supported by the citing of successful Predictions, among which atomic power and the atom bomb are usually given pride of place. When the news of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was released in 1945, John W Campbell Jr, editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, was exultant, claiming that now sf would have to be taken seriously. ...
Key, Alexander
(1904-1979) US author who began publishing novels for children with The Red Eagle (1930), and who moved into Children's SF with the Sprockets sequence beginning with Sprockets: A Little Robot (1963), tales not likely to seize a wide audience despite their amiable simplicity. It was only with the Witch Mountain Young Adult sequence – Escape to Witch Mountain (1968), ...
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 ...