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Tuesday 11 November 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.
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Haggard, William
Pseudonym of Richard Clayton (1907-1993), UK civil servant whose political thrillers – usually featuring Colonel Russell, Head of the Security Executive, retired after a decade but magisterially present throughout the end of the series – sometimes extrapolate on current political trends, after the fashion of their genre, from a right-wing position common to work of the 1960s; his work has been likened to that of John Buchan, though Haggard's ...
Ford, Mary H
(1856-1937) US lecturer and author, active from the early 1880s; most of her books were explorations in spiritualism and Religion, and she was instrumental in establishing the Bahá'í faith in America. She is primarily of sf interest for a short fiction, "A Feminine Iconoclast" (November 1889 The Nationalist), an early response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). It was published in a ...
Ayckbourn, Alan
(1939- ) UK playwright, active from 1959 with at least ninety plays produced; much of his work verges into Fantastika, some of which is of strong specific sf interest, including a triad of dramas which might almost (but not quite) be thought of as a loose series devoted to Androids in distressed English domestic environments. Henceforward (performed 1987; 1988) is set in an oppressive ...
Marshall, Helen
(1983- ) Canadian academic, author and poet, in UK from 2014, more recently in Australia; partner of Vince Haig (who writes as Malcolm Devlin) since 2015. She began to publish poetry around 2004, and published her first work of genre interest with "Skin" in Future Lovecraft (anth 2011) edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R Stiles. Most of her work – much of which has been ...
Elliott, Elton T
(1956- ) US author, editor, reviewer and publisher whose solo sf debut was "Lighting Candles on the River Styx" (March 1991 Amazing). His early novel-length work appeared in the 1980s in collaboration with Richard E Geis, under the pseudonym Richard Elliott (whom see for discussion of these books). Written in collaboration with Doug Odell, Elliott's Prince of Europe ...
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 ...