SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 March 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 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Lewis, Sinclair
(1885-1951) US author, highly esteemed in the 1920s and 1930s for such novels as Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), and first US winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1930; but his reputation had much diminished before his death, and has not recovered. Lewis's first novel, Hike and the Aeroplane (1912) as by Tom Graham, is a juvenile centred on the Invention of a futuristic 200mph ...
Gobsch, Hanns
Working name of German author Franz Johannes Gobsch (1883-1957), in active service during World War One, of some prominence during the Weimar Period; his Future War novel, Wahn-Europa 1934: Eine Vision (1931; trans Ian Fitzherbert Despard Morrow as Death Rattle 1932), depicts from a pacifist leftwing standpoint a Europe descending deliriously into ...
Pattison, Eliot
(1951- ) US author most of whose fiction consists of thrillers in the Inspector Shan sequence. Ashes of Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America (2011), is set in a Post-Holocaust America twenty-five years after the country has been devastated by international terrorism. An original founder of the village of Carthage – now a harsh pocket Dystopia in which knowledge of the ...
Stump, D L
(? -? ) US author whose sf novel, From World to World (1896; exp vt The Love of Meltha Laone; Or, Beyond the Sun 1913), describes a transit by Spaceship from Earth to Counter-Earth; various lessons are taken from this opposition of planets, focusing in particular on the advanced Utopia discovered on the latter. [JC]
White, Leslie T
(1903-1967) Canadian-born US screenwriter and author, initially a police detective in Los Angeles, an experience he used in his detective novels. Of the films in which he was involved, The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), for which he wrote the story, features a Mad Scientist who is resurrected – according to his instructions – after being hanged. Of his novels, 5,000 Trojan Horses ...
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 ...