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Monday 13 July 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 13 July 2026
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Wilbrandt, Adolf
(1837-1911) German theatre director and author whose possible relationship to Conrad Wilbrandt is undetermined; his Fridolins heimliche Ehe (1875; trans Clara Bell as Fridolin's Secret Marriage 1884), based on the life of the art historian Friedrich Eggers (181-1872), may be the first avowedly gay novel published in Germany. Of sf interest is Die Osterinsel (1894; trans A S Rapaport as ...
TARDIS
The well-known Time Machine in the television series Doctor Who; this device can also travel through interplanetary and interstellar space. Its "chameleon circuit" disguised it as an old-fashioned, dark-blue UK police telephone box prior to the first Doctor Who storyline and then (with rare later exceptions) ceased to function. As indicated by the capitals, the name is a somewhat ad-hoc acronym standing for Time And ...
Crockett, S R
(1859-1914) Scottish minister and author, who later added his middle name Rutherford; remembered primarily for a large number of novels set in the Scottish Lowlands, which established him as perhaps the least sentimental of the "Kailyard" novelists, though less well known than J M Barrie (1860-1937). Some of these tales have some supernatural elements; Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills (1894) is a Gothic romance, and The Grey Man (1896) features a cannibal. Crockett is of ...
Boyne, John
(1971- ) Irish author, active from the early 1990s, best known for the essentially nonfantastic Young Adult The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas: A Fable (2006), set in a slightly confabulated Auschwitz (see Holocaust Fiction; World War Two). Some of his other works for young adults and for children unmistakably elicit topoi from ...
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 ...