SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 10 November 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 4 November 2025
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Watkins, Peter
(1935-2025) UK Television and film director, active as a maker of documentary films from 1959. He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing television-news coverage, making his reputation with two quasidocumentaries or "docudramas" for BBC TV: Culloden (1964), in which participants at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 are interviewed by modern journalists; and ...
Shimerman, Armin
(1949- ) US actor and author, best known in the former capacity for his role as the Ferengi bartender named Quark in the Television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999); his first novel, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The 34th Rule (1999) with David R George III, is based on Quark. His Merchant Prince sequence beginning ...
Porges, Arthur
(1915-2006) US author and teacher of mathematics, brother of Irwin Porges; he began publishing sf with "Modeled in Clay" for Man to Man (August/September 1950), and subsequently published about 220 stories – a few as Peter Arthur, Abel Jacobi, Derek Page and Pat Rogers – without releasing any of them in book collections. Over half that output is mystery fiction and the balance fairly evenly divided between fantasy and sf. He was a strong and ...
Ocampo, Silvina
(1903-1993) Argentinian editor, journalist, painter, poet and author, married to Adolfo Bioy Casares from 1940 until her death, long associated with Jorge Luis Borges mainly through the almost conjugal conversations between their fiction, much of which in both cases was written in the late 1930s and 1940s; and as collaborator in the extremely influential Antologia de la Literatura Fantástica (anth ...
Grosvenor, Rachel
(circa 1987- ) UK freelance writing coach and author in whose first novel, The Finery (2023), a centenarian woman and her companion wolf resist the ostensibly benign surveillance of a Near Future Dystopian government. Her actions, which may seem implausibly successful, are narrated in a perhaps refreshingly light tone. [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 ...