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Saturday 7 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 2 March 2026
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Grant, Rob
(1955-2026) UK author, initially best known under the collaborative pseudonym Grant Naylor for his work on the Red Dwarf (1988-current) Television series (which see for discussion). Only one related novel, Grant's solo Backwards (1996), has not been published under this name; as the title suggests, the central sf theme in Backwards is that of ...
Green, Joseph
(1931-2026) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" in New Worlds for February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus stories (not all sf) have ...
Simmons, Dan
(1948-2026) US elementary school teacher circa 1971-1987 and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine for April 1982, and who was for some time thought of primarily as an author of tales of Horror, some of which – along with sf and Fantasy stories – were assembled ...
Afifi, Nadia
(1984- ) US author raised in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain who began to publish work of genre interest with "Exhibit K" in Abyss & Apex for the second quarter of 2019. She is of sf interest for the Cosmic sequence opening with her first novel The Sentient (2020) in which an escapee from a moderately distant Near Future Dystopian coercive Keep run by the ...
Day the Earth Caught Fire, The
Film (1961). British Lion/Pax/Universal. Produced and directed by Val Guest. Cast includes Arthur Christiansen, Edward Judd, Leo McKern and Janet Munro. Written by Wolf Mankowitz, Guest. 99 minutes, cut to 90 minutes (US). Black and white. / Val Guest, who had made The Quatermass Xperiment (1956) and other sf/horror films for Hammer in the 1950s, excelled himself with this intelligent Disaster ...
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 ...