SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 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 7 July 2025
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van Dongen
Working name of American artist Henry Richard van Dongen (1920-2010), at times also credited as H R van Dongen. He received extensive artistic training at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Woodbury Ross School of Painting before going to work as an artist, initially specializing in advertising and retouching photographs. He entered the sf field with the cover of the September 1950 issue of Super Science Stories, but he quickly became a ...
Bell, Julie
(1958- ) US artist, the wife of artist Boris Vallejo and mother of artists Anthony Palumbo and David Palumbo. The first thirty years of her life were unsettled, as a parental separation and a first marriage to aspiring academic and future sf scholar Donald E Palumbo forced her to relocate several times and disrupted her education. But she developed two strong interests ...
Radio
The history of radio sf is badly under-researched, but it is clear that, in some important respects, it anticipates that of Television sf. The major televisual forms – the series, the serial and the anthology – were all originally developed for radio. Many television sf programmes, from Superman and Buck Rogers to The ...
Somers, Jeff
(1971- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Glad and Big" in Apparitions for November 1995. He came to wider notice with his Avery Cates Cyberpunk sequence beginning with The Electric Church (2007) and ending with The Final Evolution (2011), set in a noirish Near Future New York, at the centre of a world run on ...
Jones, Jeffrey
(1944-2011) American artist born Jeffrey Durwood Jones, who for many years used the working name Jeff Jones, and after hormone therapy (from 1998) and gender transition was named and worked as Jeffrey Catherine Jones. After some initial work for Comic books in the mid-1960s, Jones began producing an amazing number of covers for various publishers, often illustrating works of Sword and Sorcery. This work immediately stood out for ...
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 ...