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 ...
Hard SF
Item of sf Terminology coined by P Schuyler Miller in Astounding (November 1957) and since then widely used by sf Fandom and readers; it has sometimes overlapped in meaning with "hardcore sf", often used in the 1960s and 1970s to mean the kind of Science Fiction that repeats the themes and (to a degree) the style of the ...
10 Story Fantasy
US Pulp magazine. One issue, Spring 1951, published by Avon Periodicals, edited by Donald A Wollheim. Despite the title, 10 Story Fantasy had thirteen stories, but three of these were novelettes. It featured work by several eminent authors – John Beynon (John Wyndham), L Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Fritz ...
American Flagg!
US Comic-book series (1983-1989, 63 issues), published by First Comics, created by writer/artist Howard V Chaykin. Generally considered one of the best sf Comics of the 1980s, American Flagg! is set in a media-saturated USA reduced to Third-World status, and stars Reuben Flagg, drafted into the Plexus Rangers in Chicago in the 2030s (Plexus being a Mars-based mega-cartel planning to sell off the ...
Stowaway
Film (2021). Netflix presents an Augenschein Filmproduktion, MMC Movies, Phiphen Pictures, RISE PICTURES, RainMaker Films, Stage 6 Films and XYZ Films production in association with Yale Productions and Black Canopy Films. Directed by Joe Penna. Written by Penna with Ryan Morrison. Cast includes Shamier Anderson, Toni Collette, Daniel Dae Kim and Anna Kendrick. 116 minutes. Colour. / A Spacesuit Film in which 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 ...