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Wednesday 9 July 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 7 July 2025
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Monroe, Keith
(1915-2003) US author best known for juvenile sf (and also much nonfiction) aimed at Boy Scouts. In the Time Machine series (1959-1989) – comprising 16 stories as by Donald Keith in collaboration with his father Donald Monroe (1888-1972) and seven by Monroe alone – an abandoned Time Machine enables adventures for the Scout patrol that finds it. As lifelong Scout leaders, the Monroes brought verisimilitude to their Scouting milieu. The ...
Ralph, James
(1695-1762) American-born historian, controversialist and author, in UK from 1724; his Satirical play, The Astrologer (1744 chap) – remotely based on the mistaken-doubles comedy, Albumazar (1615), by Thomas Tomkis (circa 1580-1634) – targets the tropes and lunacies of what we now call Proto SF, as conveyed through its fatuous protagonists' attempts to make sense of the vision of ...
Headley, Maria Dahvana
(1977- ) US author who first came to notice for a memoir, The Year of Yes (2006). Most of her fiction has been fantasy, though infused with a generic adventurousness typical of twenty-first century Fantastika in general, beginning with Queen of Kings (2011), which initiates a proposed series featuring Cleopatra. In this tale her historical/fantasized Cleopatra (69-20 BCE) does not die from the asp that ...
Llewellyn, Alun
(1903-1988) UK lawyer and author active in several genres, whose nonfiction generally focuses on Wales, as with his first known publication, "The Emperor of Britain": King Arthur and his Relation to Wales (lecture delivered 10 December 1930; 1930 chap). Work of some interest includes the political Satires assembled in Confound Their Politics (coll 1934), each tale set in a different imaginary country, and the amused faux-naif ...
Rewolinski, Leah
(1954- ) US author of the Star Wreck series of Parodies set in the Star Trek universe, structured so that sets of characters from different sub-series share (in a sense) the same Spaceship. Much of the humour is extremely broad, beginning with spoof alterations of individual names – Captain James T Smirk and Captain Jean-Lucy Ricardo being typical – and proceeding ...
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 ...