SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 14 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
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
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 ...
Calisher, Hortense
(1911-2009) US author of several Mainstream novels set mostly on the US East Coast and in New York itself, which she rendered with Gothic intensity. After an sf allegory, "In the Absence of Angels" (21 April 1951 The New Yorker), which associates the military occupation of the USA with a poet's own imprisonment, and the very well-known horror story "Heartburn" (January 1951 The American Mercury), came her sf ...
Rathjen, Carl H
(1909-1984) US author in various genres from boys' fiction to tales for the "slick" markets; he also wrote as Charlotte Russell. Of sf interest is his contribution to the Land of the Giants sequence, Land of the Giants: Flight of Fear (1969), about the adventures of the occupants of a Spaceship who plunge through a Wormhole to a planet occupied by giant humanoids (see ...
Akbar, Prayaag
(1982- ) Indian journalist, editor and author, whose first novel, Leila (2017), set in a Dystopian Near Future City, presents a dramatic tour through the Keep-like caste- and purity-besotted wall-divided communities of an urban world perhaps too rigid to survive. The protagonist's search for her long-lost daughter deftly exposes the futile ...
Eastwick, James
(1850-1939) UK author, tentatively identified as the solicitor (later barrister) whose birth and death appear below. He published one work of sf interest, The New Centurion: A Tale of Automatic War (September-October 1895 Longman's Magazine; 1895 chap), which argues in a thinly fictionalized Near Future frame that naval contests in any Future War will be determined by technologies enabling the remote control 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 ...