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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
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Quiex, Raymond
(? -? ) Author who wrote for the Boys' Papers, whose magnum opus was the fourteen-part Space Opera serial "The War in Space" (24 July-23 October 1926 Boys' Magazine), described in the above-cited entry for Boys' Papers as "very reminiscent of the 1930s Pulp magazines with its story of Asteroids drawn ...
Starling, Caitlin
(? - ) US interactive game designer and author who is of sf interest for her first novel, The Luminous Dead (2019), is set mostly Underground on a planet exploited primarily for its mineral deposits (see Colonization of Other Worlds); the protagonist, contracted to explore yet unknown cave systems for further resources, finds herself caught between the chthonic ...
RoboCop 2
Film (1990). Orion. Directed by Irvin Kershner. Written by Frank Miller, Walon Green from a story by Miller. Cast includes Nancy Allen, Belinda Bauer, Tom Noonan, Daniel O'Herlihy and Peter Weller. 116 minutes. Colour. / Dismissed by most critics as an unimaginative retread of RoboCop, RoboCop 2 nevertheless has merits. Its narrative clarity and dash, which deliver a vision of future Detroit as one of the deeper ...
Bambaataa, Afrika
(1957- ). US musician and performer, sometimes credited with inventing "rap" as a musical style. Bambaataa's first single "Planet Rock" (1982) sampled "Trans-Europe Express" by Kraftwerk and added Bambaataa's vocals. Blending the designedly machinic, bloodless, north-European musical style with an impassioned African-American content, though perhaps a counter-intuitive step, was a brilliant move, and proved enormously influential on ...
Anime
Loanword in Japanese, derived from "animation", thought to be in occasional use since the rise of locally-made feature cartoons in the late 1950s, but popularized through its appropriation by Osamu Tezuka on the production of the Television series Tetsuwan Atomu ["Mighty Atom"] (1963; vt Astro Boy). Tezuka used the truncated term to refer to a truncated product, ...
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 ...