SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 13 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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Badger Books
The main imprint of John Spencer and Co, used by that firm on almost all their books from about the beginning of 1955 through 1967, when the imprint was terminated. John Spencer and Co. itself was founded in 1946, incorporated in 1956 and eventually dissolved in 1983; like several other UK firms (e.g., Curtis Warren), it specialized in the production of purpose-written paperback originals in various popular genres, though the early 1950s saw some emphasis on ...
Crofton, Francis Blake
(1842-1911) Irish-born librarian and author, in Canada from 1864 (with a decade in the US) until his retirement as librarian of the Nova Scotia provincial legislature 1in 1906 and his subsequent move to England. His nonfiction work in bibliography is of some importance; of his fiction, he is of moderate sf interest for two volumes of Tall Tales [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The Major's Big-Talk Stories ...
Reincarnation
The idea of reincarnation exerts a considerable fascination; its fashionability was renewed in the latter decades of the twentieth century by Hypnotists who claimed to facilitate a "regression" of their subjects which allows access to memories of "former lives". Serial reincarnation is one of the standard varieties of Immortality. In Fantasy the notion is an axiom of the curious subgenre of "transcendental ...
Thompson, Alice
(? - ) Scottish musician and author who first became known as a founding member of the rock band The Woodentops in 1983, leaving in the 1987. She has been active as a writer from around 1990, most of her fiction consisting of Gothic explorations of extreme states, as in her first novel Justine (1990) which intricately replays, while reversing in Feminist terms, the implications of ...
Living Worlds
The notion that a planet might be a living creature is a rather startling one; indeed, it was initially used purely for its shock value. In R A Kennedy's remarkable philosophical extravaganza The Triuneverse (1912), Mars begins to reproduce by binary fission and its daughter cells devour much of the solar system. In "When the World Screamed" (25 February-3 March 1928 Liberty; April-May 1928 ...
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 ...