SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Chadwick, Philip George
(1893-1955) UK author, an insurance broker's clerk at the time of World War One, in which he served. His only novel, The Death Guard (1939), was a Scientific Romance that made little impact at the time of publication: almost certainly most of the first edition was blitzed during the destruction of Paternoster Row around midnight 29-30 December 1940 in what came to be known as the Second Great Fire of London, ...
Martin, Stuart
(1881-1947) Scottish journalist and author of fiction for boys, active from about 1919, his first long tale being "Pirates of the Main" (5 January-5 April 1924 The Scout). "Devilman of the Deep" (7 April-26 May 1934 Scoops), published anonymously and not collected in book form, features adventures amid a civilization Under the Sea whose Power Source is volcanic energy. ...
Kirkham, Nellie
(1897-1979) Birth name, used for all her writing, of the UK author whose married name from 1928 was Mrs James H D Myatt. Her sf novel, Unrest of Their Time (1938), utilizes the Time theories of J W Dunne – specifically his argument that time can be comprehended as a palimpsest of closely compressed spirals, and that different periods can be accessed by crossing over to an earlier or strand (see ...
Erskine, Douglas
Pseudonym of Scots-descended Canadian lawyer John Stuart Buchan (1852-1927). It has implausibly been suggested that Erskine was a pseudonym of John Buchan – perhaps because his son's full name was John Norman Stuart Buchan (1911-1996). Erskine's novel – A Bit of Atlantis (1900) – lacks any resemblance to Buchan's own work of the time; in this tale, a Scottish Canadian inventor, who descends from lost Atlanteans, is shipwrecked on ...
Ísberg, Fríða
(1992- ) Icelandic poet and author, active from around 2015; she is of sf interest for her first novel, Merking (2021; trans Larissa Kyzer as The Mark 2024), a Near Future Dystopia involving Cultural Engineering through "well-meant" but deeply intrusive monitoring of the population of Iceland through an ...
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 ...