SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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 ...
Wasteland
Videogame (1988). Interplay Productions. Designed by Alan Pavlish, Michael A Stackpole, Ken St Andre. Platforms: AppleII, C64, DOS. / Wasteland is a Computer Role Playing Game, played in a two-dimensional overhead view and set in the twenty-first-century Nevada desert, many years after an apocalyptic nuclear war. This milieu has a similar flavour to the future ...
Belot, Adolphe
(1829-1890) Guadeloupe-born French playwright and author of popular fiction, mostly melodramatic, and probably too "racy" to be publishable in English during his lifetime. He is known in translation only for the Miss Poles sequence comprising La Sultane parisienne (1877) and La Vénus Noire: Voyage Dans l'Afrique Central (1877; trans George D Cox as The Black Venus: A Tale of the Dark Continent 1881), both volumes having been translated ...
Scientific Detective Monthly
US letter-size magazine; ten monthly issues, January to October 1930, published from New York by Techni-Craft Publishing Co; edited by Hugo Gernsback, with Arthur B Reeve as editorial consultant. It was a sister magazine to Science Wonder Stories (see Wonder Stories) and Air Wonder Stories. From issue #6 it was retitled ...
Kaempfert, Wade
An editorial House Name pseudonym (pronounced Kemfer) used by the editors of Rocket Stories: Lester del Rey on the first two issues and Harry Harrison on the third. [PN]
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 ...