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Tuesday 6 October 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 5 October 2026
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Swift, Jonathan
(1667-1745) Irish satirist, cleric, poet and author, dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, from 1713, who began publishing with the relatively innocuous Ode: to the King on his Irish Expedition (1691 chap), but who soon composed A Tale of a Tub [for subtitle see Checklist] (1704) anonymous, written almost a decade before it was published. Along with the title squib, the book incorporated a second Satire, usually called today "The Battle ...
L'Estrange, Henry
Pseudonym of an unidentified late-nineteenth-century UK author (? - ) whose Platonia: A Tale of Other Worlds (1893) presents its narrator with an ancient design for a Spaceship which takes him to the planet Platonista, located this side of Mars, where an oddity of the atmosphere permits telescopic perusal of our world (see Time Viewer) as it was 100 ...
Jeffries, Sagan
Pseudonym of Canadian athlete and author Ed Lukowich (1946- ) whose curling career climaxed with the captainship of the 1986 team which won the World Curling Championship. In his sf novel, The Trillionist (2013) a Superman on another planet singlehandedly brings his culture up to Technological speed within a few decades, and begins to conquer space; at which point, he must defend his actions in a ...
Oppegaard, David
(1979- ) US author whose first novel, The Suicide Collectors (2008), radically mutates an old horror trope – the corpse-devouring ghoul – into a Near Future sf tale of considerable force. For five years Earth has suffered under a "disease" or perhaps recognition known as the Despair, which has caused the Suicide of most of the world's population; their bodies are routinely gathered up ...
Russ, Joanna
(1937-2011) US academic and author who taught at various universities from 1970; she was a professor of English at the University of Washington from 1977 until her retirement in 1991. She began publishing sf in with "Nor Custom Stale" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for September 1959, a journal to which she also contributed intermittent but influential book reviews between 1967 and 1980. Her early work is less formally innovative than the stories ...
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 ...