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Thursday 14 May 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 11 May 2026
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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Mason, Zachary
(1974- ) US computer scientist and author whose first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007; rev 2010), though it may be read simplistically as a literary fantasia on Homer's Odyssey, successfully invokes the telling literalism of Fantastika in its rewriting of various episodes of the original in more or less Alternate World terms. Some of the ...
Emtsev, Mikhail
(1930-2003) Russian scientist and author whose most significant work was accomplished in collaboration with Eremei Parnov, also a trained scientist. They began their career with Hard-SF stories in 1961, publishing titles like Uravneniie s Blednogo Neptuna (coll 1964; title story trans Helen Saltz Jacobson as "The Pale Neptune Equation" in New Soviet Sf, anth 1979; "Dusha Mira" trans Antonina W Bouis as ...
Appleton, Jane Sophia
(1816-1884) US editor and author of regional texts, focused primarily on Bangor, Maine; Voices from the Kenduskeag (anth 1848) with Cornelia Crosby Barrett, assembles poems and stories for a local audience, some fantastical; much of the material seems to be directly by Appleton. Of sf interest in the book are "Vision of Bangor in the Twentieth Century" and "Sequel to the Vision of Bangor", in which a distant Near Future Bangor is seen as a ...
Herbert, Benson
(1912-1991) UK editor and author with a master's degree in science who began publishing sf in US magazines with "The World Without" in Wonder Stories for February 1931 and was fairly active in the 1930s; this mentions the concept of "some other world parallel to our own" and its sequel "The World Within" (August 1931 Wonder Stories) appears to contain the first use of Parallel World 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 ...