SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 20 April 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.
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Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
Influential Graphic Novel by writer-artist Frank Miller, starring an aged, cynical and disillusioned Batman, who begrudgingly returns from a ten-year retirement amidst a Near-Future Dystopia that has overrun his beloved Gotham City with gang violence. Published in four volumes in 1986 by DC Comics and ...
Adams, Nicholas
A House Name initially associated with the Horror High and Nightmares series of Young Adult novels, plus other Ties; used jointly by Debra Doyle and James D Macdonald, and solo by John Peel (whose titles under this name are standalones, not ties), Sherwood ...
Preston, Douglas
(1956- ) US author most of whose novels of sf interest have been with Lincoln Child; they are listed below for convenience, but for discussion see the entry for Child. The Wyman Ford sequence of Technothrillers, by Preston alone, comprises Blasphemy (2008), a Near Future tale in which a new supercollider threatens either to suck the world into a ...
Ray, Robert
(1928- ) Hungarian-born author, who may have changed or modified his name after coming to the UK in 1957. He began publishing sf with "The Craving for Blackness" in New Worlds for September 1962, set in a world where only women can go into space. His sf novels, bleak but otherwise unexceptional, are No Stars for Us (1964), The Seedy (1969) – whose titular protagonist is a fertile exception to near-universal ...
St John, Arthur
(1862-1938) Indian-born author, in UK from early years; his only slightly fictionalized Utopia, Why Not Now?: A British Islander's Dream (1939), promulgates a pastoral, neighbourhood-based Near Future Britain. [JC]
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 ...