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Friday 11 July 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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Defoe, Daniel
(1660-1731) UK merchant, professional spy and man of letters born Daniel Foe, becoming Defoe in the 1690s after he began to write; the extremely prolific author of many works of various kinds under a variety of names (once estimated to exceed 200 in number), though the huge canon of unsigned and pseudonymous works once attributed to him has been convincingly diminished to somewhere slightly in excess of 300 titles in all. He is best known today for his novel ...
Gee, Maggie
(1948- ) UK author whose first published novel, Dying in Other Words (1981), is a perhaps over-exuberant experimental work which could be interpreted as having ghostly elements along Posthumous-Fantasy lines [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. In The Burning Book (1983) an ordinary contemporary family's problems are overshadowed by overriding visionary glimpses of ...
Rochon, Esther
(1948- ) Canadian author, born Esther Blackburn, who began publishing sf with "L'Initiateur et les étrangers" ["The Initiator and the Strangers"] for Marie-Françoise in 1964, for which she had tied with Michel Tremblay for first prize in the story section of the Jeunes Auteurs de Radio-Canada competition; she continued publishing stories frequently, and cofounded the journal imagine ... (see ...
Volt
Pseudonym of Italian Futurist poet and theoretician Vincenzo Fani Ciotti (1888-1927), whose sf novel, La fine del mondo ["The End of the World"] (1921), is a declaredly Fascist tale whose hero – frustrated at Earth's refusal to clear Jupiter of its natives so that humanity can press outwards to create a Galactic Empire – travels to that planet, where he immolates himself in a great explosion that destroys ...
Captain Nemo and the Underwater City
Film (1969). Omnia/MGM. Directed by James Hill. Written by Pip and Jane Baker, R Wright Campbell, based on the character created by Jules Verne. Cast includes Chuck Connors, Nanette Newman, Luciana Paluzzi and Robert Ryan. 106 minutes. Colour. / Towards the end of the nineteenth century a ship sinks in a violent storm. A few survivors find themselves on board a mysterious underwater vessel, the Nautilus, under the command of the legendary ...
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 ...