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Saturday 17 May 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.
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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Coetzee, J M
(1940- ) South African author (in Australia from 2002) and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, some of whose work relates to the fantastic. Works clearly standing outside any mimetic tradition include Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), which offers something like a Future War scenario – though one as chillingly abstract as that presented in Dino ...
Doten, Mark
(1978- ) US editor and author in whose first novel, The Infernal (2015), a feral child suffering burns is found in the ruins of contemporary Iraq. His American captors plug him into an interrogation device known as a Memex which is "guaranteed " to extract truth from its subjects, and he begins to speak in tongues, channelling various figures from Osama bin Laden to Mark Zuckerberg. The tale avoids any thin-concept understanding in terms of ...
Tew, Jill
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the The Dividing Sky (2024), is set in a Near Future Dystopian world whose poorer inhabitants sell their Memories to the rich. The protagonist, having been induced to enter forbidden territory in order to please a buyer, is arrested by a young policeman she falls in love with. He reciprocates. [JC]
Geston, Mark S
(1946- ) US attorney and author whose remarkable first novel Lords of the Starship (1967) was published while he was still a student at Kenyon College. This work, which establishes the dark mood of all his fiction and, like its immediate successors – each of which is a study in cultural and technological Decadence set in a weary, war-torn Far-Future Earth – describes a depressive ...
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 ...