SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 25 May 2022
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 23 May 2022
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Wilson, Colin
(1931-2013) UK author of speculative works, who remains best known for his first book, The Outsider (1956), in which he gave graphic expression to the brilliant autodidactism, the erratic system-building mentality, the tendency to treat himself (and a previous few others) as a natural elite, and the voracity for new mental sensations that would mark the very numerous titles he would produce over the next several decades, many of them of some indirect interest to sf and fantasy writers and ...
Bakis, Kirsten
(1968- ) Swiss-born US author (of Estonian parentage) whose only novel to date, Lives of the Monster Dogs (1997), comes close to Beast Fable in its complex accounting of the fate of a nineteenth-century experiment, rather similar to that dissected in H G Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), in the surgical modification of dogs into creatures resembling humans. The dogs' enforced removal to an effective prison environment in Canada, and their eventual escape to New ...
Mullen, Stanley
(1911-1974) US artist, museum curator and pulp author who wrote over thirty sf and fantasy stories, beginning with "A Dero Named Clarence" for The Gorgon in 1947, many of them Space Opera, often in Planet Stories, until about 1959. His three books, from Small Presses, are Kinsmen of the Dragon (1951), which pits the hero against a secret society whose magical science has roots in a Parallel World which, being Under the Sea, is accessible by submarine; Sphinx Child (1948 chap), a fantasy short ...
Spies, Spoofs & Super Guys
Letter-size, saddle-stapled Cinema magazine. One issue only, dated 1966, from Dell Publishing. No editor named. / This was the nearest that Dell Publications ever came to issuing a "monster magazine" or sf media title, apparently intended from the outset as a one-off publication. Television articles dealt with the series The Avengers (1961-1969), Batman (1966-1968), Get Smart! (1965-1970) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968); films covered included the early James Bond features and such ...
Ni Kuang
Main writing name of Ni Cong (1935- ), a Chinese author whose life began unpromisingly as a teenage drop-out, before his swift rise through the ranks of the Communist Party security police. Accused of counter-revolutionary activities, he fled to Hong Kong in 1957 and embraced anti-Communist fiction with all the zeal of a convert. His first professional sale, the non-genre Huomai ["Buried Alive"] (December 1957 Keung Sheung Daily News) was a grotesque account of Communist ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...