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Sunday 15 June 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 9 June 2025
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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Diary of Tortov Roddle, The
Japanese animated film series (2003); original title Aru tabibito no nikki. Robot Communications. Created, written and directed by Kunio Kato. Nine 2-6 minute episodes (including three OVAs). Colour. / Tortov Roddle is a lanky young man in top hat, scarf and black coat: his diary records "One day I travelled to the northern plains"; he does so riding a pig whose elongated legs recall Salvador Dalí's Los Elefantes (1948). He witnesses ...
Bing, Stanley
Pseudonym of US television executive, humorous essayist and author Gil Schwartz (1951-2020), a columnist for Fortune magazine for many years following a decade at Esquire. His first novel, Lloyd: What Happened: A Novel of Business (1998), in which a world-transforming project is never actually described, shies just short of the fantastic. Bing is of sf interest for the Near Future Immortal Life: (A Soon to Be True Story) ...
Pascal, Jacques
Pseudonym of unidentified US author (? - ) of two Near Future erotic novels (see Sex), Virgin's Sacrifice (1980) and Futuresex (1981). [JC]
Barrett, William E
(1900-1986) US amateur pilot and author, many of whose stories were nonfantastic recounts of World War One combat; he had published Flight from Youth (1939) before the war, later incorporating it into The Edge of Things (coll 1960), whose three stories all relate in some way to flying. Much earlier, he began publishing short stories with "The Music of Madness" for Weird Tales, March 1926. His sf novel, The Fools of Time ...
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 ...