SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 December 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 8 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Mears, A Garland
(circa 1842-1920) UK author active in the 1890s whose Utopia, Mercia, the Astronomer Royal: A Romance (1895), set a century hence in 2002, frames within a burdensome romantic plot its description of a Europe dominated by Germanic "races", with equality for women (see Feminism), advances in Technology, and something like Psi Powers. [JC]
Captain Pipeclay
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? -? ) of The Battle of Foxhill, the Prince of Wales in a Mess [for full title see Checklist] (1871 chap), a Satire which uses the Battle of Dorking scenario to comment on contemporary politics. [JC]
Russell, Ken
(1927-2011) UK film and television director, of greatest sf interest in this area for Altered States (1980), which see. His Gothic (1986) features the famous gathering at the Villa Diodati that included Lord Byron, John Polidori and Mary Shelley. The Lair of the White Worm (1988) is loosely based on Bram ...
Goldbarth, Albert
(1948- ) US academic, collector of 1950s space toys and poet who remains outside the loose grouping of poets (see Poetry) that has dominated American sf poetry for many years; he has not, for instance, ever won a Rhysling Award, though he has received some more general recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Book Critics Circle award twice. His one novel, Pieces of Payne ...
Smith, James Robert
(1957- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Things Not Seen" in 2 AM for Spring 1987, most of his short work being horror. His first novel, The Flock (2006), is a very Near Future action-heavy tale featuring the eponymous civilization of highly intelligent prehistoric birds, whose survival into the present in the backwoods of inland Florida has been made possible by its enormous care not to ...
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 ...