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Thursday 17 April 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 14 April 2025
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Jakes, John
(1932-2023) US author initially best known for sf and fantasy, under his own name and various pseudonyms including Alan Henry, Jacob Johns, Alan Payne, Jay Scotland and Alan Wilder, before launching his Bicentennial series of novels, which traces the fictional history of a US family over the past 200 years. It achieved extraordinary bestsellerdom, undoubtedly justifying, at least financially, his decision to retire from the genre. Most of his shorter work, beginning with "The Dreaming ...
Weird Adventures
US Comic (1952). Ziff-Davis. One issue, numbered #10. Artists include John Celardo and Phil Marini. 36 pages, with four long strips, a two-page text story and a one-page non-fiction strip. / In the 1950s the use of "weird" in a comic's title usually meant a focus on Horror; however, despite one story referring to black Magic, Weird Adventures is best considered an sf ...
Shea, Michael
(1938-2009) Scottish diplomat and author, press secretary to the Queen between 1978 and 1987; it has been suggested that he left this post under a cloud for having exhibited candour. His fiction – about twenty novels in all – more safely conveys his wry, politically centrist point of view. As Michael Sinclair (his given names) he wrote a Near-Future thriller in which shameless entrepreneurs manipulate international money markets, ...
Precognition
The usual term for the ESP talent, or Psi Power or Superpower, of seeing into the future. For genuine sf relevance this ability needs to be developed in somewhat more detail than the all too frequent narrative convenience of "some sixth sense warned him ..." Philip K Dick seems to have coined the term "precog" for a thus-gifted person, in "A World of Talent" (October 1954 ...
Stone, Rodney
(1932- ) UK author, mostly of nonfantastic thrillers under his own name and as by Matthew Hunter. Of sf interest is The Cambridgeshire Disaster (1967) as by Hunter, featuring the Near Future destruction of that academic enclave; Cries in the Night (1991), in which the contemporary abduction of two children uncannily evokes events from World War Two, does not in fact trespass ...
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 ...