SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 18 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Janine G Stinson
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
From the Drain
Film (1967). Produced by David Cronenberg and Stefan Nosko. Directed and written by Cronenberg. Cast comprises Stefan Nosko and Mort Ritts. 14 minutes. Colour. / Two men are in a bathtub. The first (Ritts, who starred in David Cronenberg's first student film, Transfer [1966]) is sat at the plughole-end of the bath and proceeds to ask a series of insinuating and ...
Geier, Chester S
(1921-1990) US author and editor who began publishing work of genre interest with "A Length of Rope" for Unknown in April 1941; he was very active in the Ziff-Davis stable (for Amazing and Fantastic Adventures) in the 1940s, where he published a large amount of routine material under his own name and pseudonyms including Guy Archette and the ...
Thomson, Rupert
(1955- ) UK author, active from around 1987, the abrupt expressionist shiftings of whose novels sometimes allow them to be seen in terms of Fantastika, though this can be a semblance, and an occasional tint of allegory can signal the Mainstream Writer of SF. The infant Moses, protagonist of his first novel, Dreams of Leaving (1987), is floated down a river towards ...
Makin, William J
(1893-1944) UK journalist and author who was in active service during World War One, a prolific writer of magazine fiction beginning in the 1920s, his first work of genre interest being "The Black Laugh" in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror for January 1932. At least one of his Jonathan Jow tales, the novel-length "The Monster of the Loch" (20 January-3 March 1934 Pearson's Weekly) with Leslie Arliss ...
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 ...