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Sunday 15 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
White, T H
(1906-1964) Indian-born author, in the UK from the age of five, where he was raised by relatives; his overwhelming nostalgia for a lost England expressed itself vividly throughout nonfiction like England Have my Bones (1936), as well as in his two best-known fictional works, the nonfantastic Farewell Victoria (1933), and The Once and Future King (omni/novel 1958), a superlative tragicomic fantasia on Le Morte Darthur (written before 1471; ...
Taffrail
Pseudonym of UK naval officer and author Henry Taprell Dorling (1883-1968), in the UK navy from 1897 through World War One, retiring in 1929; he served again during World War Two. He began his prolific career as an author with All About Ships: A Book for Boys (1912), almost all his work being nonfantastic stories of the sea, and came to some attention late in life when it was suggested that his early novel, ...
Yanagihara, Hanya
(1974- ) US journalist, editor and author best-known for the nonfantastic novel A Little Life (2015). Her first novel, The People in the Trees (2013), which is of sf interest, takes some elements from the life and career of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923-2008), an eminent medical researcher who identified a cure for kuru, a deadly disease afflicting the South Fore people of New Guinea through their practice of funerary cannibalism, for which he ...
De Bolt, Joe
(1939- ) US sociologist and university professor who in the 1970s edited useful critical anthologies on John Brunner and Ursula K Le Guin, contributing his own bio-bibliographical researches to both. These are The Happening Worlds of John Brunner: Critical Explorations in Science Fiction (anth 1975) and Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space (anth ...
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 ...