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Wednesday 7 October 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.
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Wharton, William
Pseudonym of US teacher, painter and author Albert William du Aime (1925-2008), mostly in Paris from about 1960. Though his real name was known for many years, it was not revealed publicly until late in life, so that his pseudonymous writing career could be conducted separately from his career as a painter. Best known for Fabulations with a Magic-Realist colouring, like Birdy (1979), whose protagonist's longing to ...
Batey, Joey
(1989- ) UK singer-songwriter, actor and author, active as a musician from university years, and as a film/television actor from 2013. He is of sf interest for It's Not a Cult (2025) (see Music), in which a folk-rock band plays songs whose apparent meaningless lyrics, as transformed into Basilisk-like Memes on the Internet, cause chaos. [JC]
Venturini, Fred
(1980- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Threshold" (in Sick Things: An Anthology of Extreme Creature Horror, anth 2010, edited by Cheryl Mullenax), and whose Young Adult first novel, The Samaritan (2011; vt The Heart Does Not Grow Back 2014), also makes use of Horror in SF tropes to give verisimilitude to the story of a highschool ...
Galactic Cowboys
US rock group who have returned repeatedly to sf themes in their music, often evoking motifs and venues found in sf Westerns. Their 1991 eponymous debut crashes and bashes through songs that use the Moon landing, including audio samples of Neil Armstrong, as a point of reference: particularly "Pump Up The Space Suit" and the ironically titled (given its raucously insistent heavy metal style) "Sea of Tranquillity". "Ranch on Mars" ...
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 ...