SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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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Bay, Michael
(1965- ) US filmmaker with a trademark in lavish, bombastic action spectacle characterized by massive hardware, explosions, and US military heroics. A graduate of the same film programme at Wesleyan University as Joss Whedon (his senior by a year), Bay's early work was in commercials and music video before he was talent-spotted by producing partners Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer to direct Bad Boys (1993) and ...
Cassiday, Bruce
(1920-2005) US editor and author, who worked as editor with various Pulp-magazine publishers (mainly Popular Publications) and for Argosy from the May 1955 issue for some years. He wrote nonfiction under his own name, and fiction under various pseudonyms and/or House Names, including Carson Bingham, Mary Anne Drew, Robert Faraday, C K Fong, Annie Laurie McMurdie and Con ...
Brazil
Brazilian Proto SF is being slowly rediscovered in the last decades, revealing some works that shed light on the problematic relationship between scientific ideas and the literature of fiction in the country. An early important text is Páginas da história do Brasil, escritas no ano 2000 ["Pages of a History of Brazil, Written in the Year 2000"] (1868-1872 in the newspaper O Jequitinhonha) by Joaquim Felício dos Santos (1828-1895), ...
Irvanets, Oleksandr
(1961- ) Ukrainian author, poet, and translator, of genre interest for his dystopia Rivni/Rovno (2002), which imagined his hometown split by a Political border inspired by his experience of visiting Berlin during the Cold War. / Framed in part as a tourist guide to the twinned cities (compare to similar Fabulation in the works of ...
Robots
The word "robot" first appeared in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (1920; trans 1923), and is derived from the Czech robota (statute labour), making it clear that Čapek intended his drama to comment on Slavery (see Imperialism), class, race (see Race in SF), and social revolution. What he called robots are artificial human beings of organic ...
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 ...