SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Zola, Émile
(1840-1902) French author whose long and intense Rougon-Macquart sequence of Naturalist novels (1871-1893) includes tales like Nana (1880; trans E A Vizetelly 1884), for which he was once notorious. Zola is of sf interest for Vérité (1903 2vols; trans E A Vizetelly as Truth 1903), the third instalment of his unfinished Les Quatre Évangiles ["The Four Evangelists"] quartet, which was planned to espouse a kind of ...
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. Crisis! – 1992 (October 1935-January/February 1936 Wonder Stories as "The Perfect World"; 1936), with an introduction by M P Shiel, deals with the ominous passage of ...
Rice, Jeff
Working name of US author Jeffrey Grant Rice (1944-2015), best known for his novel The Night Stalker (written 1970; 1973), which before publication was adapted by Richard Matheson as the made-for-television film The Night Stalker (1972). The protagonist of both book and film is newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak, whose investigation of a serial killer leads to a Vampire culprit. The next, very ...
Quinn, Tory
(? - ) US scientist and author whose first novel, Twilight of the Gods (2021), is fantasy; in the Young Adult Mindborg (2022), the scientist father of a son with epilepsy attempts a surgical procedure to cure him, but fails, while simultaneously awakening Superpowers that arouse inimical attention; for a description of MegaDeath (2022) with Marie ...
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 ...