SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 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 14 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Glasgow 2024 (Worldcon)
Davies, Gruff
(1970- ) UK software designer, entrepreneur and author, developer of Kwiziq, a "language coach" for communicating with and instructing AIs. He is of sf interest for The Looking Glass Club (2010), which examines the consequences, twenty-five years into the Near Future, of a 2010 experiment in reality-manipulation (see Perception; ...
Rip Hunter, Time Master
A DC Comics Superhero, created by Jack Miller and Ruben Moreira in 1959; after appearances in Showcase, he graduated to his own title, which lasted from 1961 to 1965. He is a Scientist who invents a time-traveling vehicle, the Time Sphere (see Time Travel), and with three colleagues – Jeff Smith, Bonnie Baxter, and Corky Baxter – he made regular ...
Lambert, Verity
(1935-2007) UK Television producer who, as the first in that role (1963-1965) for Doctor Who (1963-current), had an immense influence on the show's shape and themes, which has lasted to the present day. At the time Lambert was the only female drama producer – and the youngest – at the BBC; she was appointed by the Head of Drama, Sydney Newman, who had developed the series (along with Donald Wilson and C E Webber). ...
Brown, Robin
(1937- ) UK author of a Near Future political tale, A Forest Is a Long Time Growing (1967), which is set in Africa, and of Megalodon (1981; vt Shark! 1983), in which a prehistoric shark, 200 feet long, is finally killed after much turmoil. [JC]
Fantastyka
Polish monthly Magazine launched in the gloomy times of martial law in October 1982 as the first press publication exclusively devoted to Fantastika (John Clute's umbrella term is consciously and deliberately evoked here as derived from the Eastern European languages, including Polish "fantastyka", which universally covers all literature with fantastic elements in it and rather naturally was chosen as ...
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 ...