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Tuesday 8 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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Taine, John
Pseudonym for all his fiction of Scottish-born mathematician and author Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960), permanently in US from 1902; under his own name he wrote at least 250 papers and several studies in mathematical history and theory. Taine's first novels were Lost-World tales: The Purple Sapphire (1924), set in Tibet where an ancient race possesses the secret of atomic power; and The Gold Tooth (1927), set in Korea, where another ...
Bertagna, Julie
(1962- ) Scottish author who has concentrated until recently on books for younger children; her Young Adult sf Exodus sequence comprising Exodus (2002), Zenith (2007) and Aurora (2011), is a tale of global warming (see Climate Change) beginning in 2099, continuing into the early twenty-second century and skipping forward to 2116 in the third volume. The ...
Colombia
Colombian sf has gone through at least four stages in its history. The first stage runs from the late 1800s to 1930 (these and other dates are approximations). One cannot speak of science fiction literature per se during these decades, but rather of the isolated appearance of sf motifs and short stories, such as "Phrazomela" ["Phrazomela"] (December 1892 Revista Gris 1:3) by Emilio Cuervo Márquez (1873-1937), "Bogotá en el año 2000" ["Bogotá in the Year ...
Rice, Jeff
Working name of US author Jeffrey Grant Rice (1944-2015), best known for his novel The Night Stalker (written 1970; 1973), which before publication was adapted by Richard Matheson as the made-for-television film The Night Stalker (1972). The protagonist of both book and film is newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak, whose investigation of a serial killer leads to a Vampire culprit. The next, very ...
Ross, Charles
(1864-1930) UK soldier and author who reached the rank of Major-General during active service in World War One; brother of Sir Ronald Ross. After publishing considerable nonfiction on military materials, he released several novels after his retirement. Of sf interest is The Fly-by-Nights (1921), depicting a Near Future teetotal Britain threatened by the illegal importation of ...
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 ...