SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 18 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Filk
One of the more enduring coinages of Fan Language, this is the short form of "filksong", which in turn originated from the obvious typo in an early-1950s Fanzine article, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music" by Lee Jacobs (intended for the APA SAPS, the Spectator Amateur Press Society, but not actually published there owing to bawdy content). The first ...
Banister, Manly
(1914-1986) fan and author responsible for an early Fanzine of professional quality, The Nekromantikon (1950-1951), which ran to five issues, but who had earlier begun publishing fiction of genre interest with "Satan's Bondage" for Weird Tales in September 1942. Egoboo: A Fantasy Satire (1950 chap) is a short Time-Travel spoof which satirizes sf ...
Simsa, Cyril
(1960- ) UK teacher and author, in the Czech Republic from 1992, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Adam the Antigen" in Matrix for December 1977 (see British Science Fiction Association). Much of his work engages with fantasy and horror topoi through Alternate World frames, implied or explicit, as with the tales assembled in ...
Munsey, Frank A
(1854-1925) US newspaper and magazine publisher and author. He began publishing in 1882 with The Golden Argosy, a weekly Boys' Paper, later transformed into The Argosy. Munsey expanded his titles to include Munsey's Magazine, The Scrap Book, The All-Story, Cavalier ...
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 ...