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Wednesday 11 March 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 9 March 2026
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Matschat, Cécile
(1895-1976) US geographer, botanist and author, chiefly of nonfiction about gardens and US geographical features though also including novels, two of them murder mysteries [not listed below]. She co-edited two Anthologies aimed at younger readers: American Boy Adventure Stories (anth 1952) with Carl Carmer (1893-1976), whose stories were selected from The American Boy, and the ...
Friedberg, Gertrude
(1908-1989) US author who also taught. Her career as a playwright began early, with Three Cornered Moon (1933), which was later filmed, but she began publishing sf only in April 1963, with "The Short and Happy Death of George Frumkin" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her fine sf novel The Revolving Boy (1966) strikingly tells the story of a child sensitive from his unique birth in free fall to signals, possibly ...
SFinks
Polish Semiprozine – so described by its founder Wojtek Sedeńko – devoted to Fantastika; first published from Olsztyn in Autumn 1994. [See also Publishing history below.] Conceived as a Polish analogue of the trade journal Locus, this was initially a quarterly carrying nonfiction content such as bibliographic listings, publisher and author profiles, ...
Kirkby, John
(circa 1705-1754) UK clergyman and author whose two main works were plagiarized and who may also have written as Pythagorolunister (see Checklist below for title). He substantially lifted his A New English Grammar (1746) from New Grammar (1745) by Anne Fisher (1719-1778), and is not therefore responsible for the eighteenth-century invention of the convention that "he" can stand for he, or she, or it. Fisher's ...
Nichols, Robert
(1893-1944) UK poet, playwright and author whose lyrical talent did not survive the end of World War One, in which he served, becoming famous for the war poems assembled in Invocations (coll 1915 chap); from 1920 he wrote plays, verse epics and some fiction. The Smile of the Sphinx (1920 chap), a fantasy, was later revised and assembled in ...
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 ...