SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 July 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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Smith, Clark Ashton
(1893-1961) US sculptor and author, of primary interest for his tales of Science Fantasy and horror (see Horror in SF); the rich style (sometimes idiomatic, sometimes "jewelled" in the early Lord Dunsany manner) and baroque invention of this work did much to transform the interplanetary romance of the early years of the century into the full-fledged Post-World War Two ...
Goodwin, John C
(1891-1951) UK author, after active service during World War One, of several popular books on crime and criminals, and of The Rainbox (1935), an Invention tale about a rain-making device. [JC]
Tsouras, Peter G
(? - ) US soldier, intelligence officer and author of Greek descent, most of whose books are nonfictional or lightly fictionalized Alternate Histories with an emphasis on military matters and featuring clearly articulated Jonbar Points, beginning with Gettysburg: An Alternate History (1997), in which a number of military actions are described as having turned out ...
Entropy
In its strict meaning, "entropy" is a thermodynamics term, first used by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) in 1850 to describe the amount of heat that must be put into a closed system to bring it to a given state. The Second Law of Thermodynamics – often stated in terms of work as "it is impossible to produce work by transferring heat from a cold body to a hot body in any self-sustaining process" – can alternatively be rendered: "Entropy always increases in any closed ...
Hall, Alexis
Pseudonym of UK author (1984- ), active from around 2010, almost all of whose work [here unlisted] has been in the romantic-fantasy set of subgenres. Of sf interest is Hell's Heart (2026), set in a near Far Future Earth long after the catastrophic career of Homo sapiens has relegated human survivors to domes (see City; Zone) where they are fed by mysterious ...
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 ...