SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 19 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
McCaffrey, Anne
(1926-2011) US-born professional horsebreeder and author, in Ireland from the 1970s; mother of Gigi McCaffrey and Todd McCaffrey. Most of her output was sf, though tinged with the tone and instruments of Fantasy: much of her main work, the enormous Pern sequence of Planetary Romance adventures (see below) is normally experienced as fantasy. She began ...
Stalking the Night Fantastic
Role Playing Game (1983). Tri Tac Games. Designed by Richard Tucholka, Chris Belting. / While it is often reminiscent of the similarly titled Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975), Stalking the Night Fantastic takes a far more light-hearted approach to its investigations of the alien and the extraordinary. Players adopt the roles of agents of "Bureau 13", a secret branch of the ...
Trimble, Louis
(1917-1988) US author and academic, prolific in several genres including mysteries and Westerns – he wrote sixty-six novels by 1977 – but relatively little sf; his only sf short story was Probability (April 1954 If; 2010 ebook). His sf novels came later, in a spurt, beginning with the Anthropol Bureau tales – Anthropol (1968 dos) and The Noblest Experiment in the Galaxy (1970 ...
Gardner, Craig Shaw
(1949- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Rocket Roll" for Unearth in Spring 1978. He is almost exclusively associated with fantasy, both original titles (chiefly Humour) – beginning with the Ebenezum and Wuntvor humorous romps whose first volume is A Malady of Magics (fixup 1986) [see Checklist below] – and a range of very competent ...
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 ...