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Wednesday 15 January 2025
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.
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BEM
A once common item of sf Terminology, being an acronym of Bug-Eyed Monster and referring to the type of Alien creature, usually menacing, which was regularly pictured on the covers of SF Magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. [PN] see also: Monsters. /
Bakker, R Scott
(1967- ) Canadian author whose early work was Fantasy, but who has more recently published some sf work. The complex ongoing fantasy enterprise – which, under the overall title of The Second Apocalypse, comprises two series, the Prince of Nothing sequence beginning with The Darkness That Comes Before (2003) and the Aspect-Emperor sequence beginning with The Judging Eye (2008) – ...
King, Vincent
Pseudonym of UK author, artist and teacher Rex Thomas Vinson (1935-2000) ("King" being a play on "Rex"), who worked in Cornwall and began publishing sf with "Defence Mechanism" for New Writings in SF No 9 (anth 1966) edited by E J Carnell. His first novel, Light a Last Candle (1969), perhaps overcomplicatedly portrays a world almost entirely conquered by a Hive Mind composed of intelligent molluscs from ...
Williams, Francis Howard
(1844-1922) US critic and author whose Atman: The Documents in a Strange Case (1891), though its substance could be deemed occultish, has some interest through its structure. Williams himself appears in the tale as the holder of various documents that demonstrate the Psi Powers of the young woman brought to grief by a Mad Scientist, Professor Perdicaris. Metempsychosis is involved. [JC]
Hunt, Wray
(?1886-1951) UK author, not to be confused with the essayist Wray Hunt (? -1897), nor probably with the 1970s horror author Wray Hunt. He is of some sf interest for The Voyage to Vineland (1933), a tale which verges on Prehistoric SF in its recounting of the interactions between Mayans and Vikings a millennium ago; Galleons' Doom Deep (1939) describes the discovery of a City five miles ...
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 ...