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Sunday 7 December 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.
Site updated on 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
McDonnell, Caimh
(1975- ) Irish stand-up comedian and author whose nonfantastic novels [not listed below] have appeared as by Caimh McDonnell. His only work of some sf interest, The Stranger Times (2021) as by C K McDonnell, is a spoofish Satire on a more or less contemporary Britain not dissimilar to the societies portrayed by authors like Tom Holt or Robert Rankin. The protagonist of ...
Silberstang, Edwin
(1930-2012) US lawyer and author, mostly of nonfiction books on gambling techniques; of sf interest is Sweet Land of Liberty (1972), a Near Future Political thriller in which the daughter of the American president after Richard Nixon is kidnapped, and treated very roughly. [JC]
Drake, David A
(1945-2023) US lawyer, publisher and author who served in the US Army in Vietnam 1969-1971 and then as the Assistant Town Attorney in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1972-1980, becoming a full-time writer in 1981, although his first story, the H P Lovecraft pastiche "Denkirch", had appeared much earlier, in Travellers by Night (anth 1967) edited by August W Derleth. The wide success of his various ...
Brown, Erik J
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the Young Adult All That's Left in the World (2022), describes the romance between two young men who have survived the planetary Disaster of a savage Pandemic, and upon their meeting in a cabin in the forest must learn how to live in the new world (see Survivalist Fiction). ...
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 ...