SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 11 December 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 8 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Thorpe, Fred
Pseudonym of Frank Albert Stearns (1854-1899), US dime novelist and author under his own name of two popular children's books based on the Arabian Nights, Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1895) and Sindbad, Smith and Co (1896); he was the father of Edgar Franklin Stearns, who wrote as Edgar Franklin. As Thorpe he wrote many kinds of dime novel (see Dime-Novel SF), but was best known for marvel ...
Urban Legends
Modern oral folklore – also spread via newspapers, photocopier graffiti and, now predominantly, the Internet (see Creepypasta). An urban legend is typically a Tall Tale [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] with a frisson of deserved comeuppance or Horror, very often related as having actually happened to a "friend of a friend" – a ...
Dayton, Arwen Elys
(1974- ) US author of a romance sf tale, Sovereign's Gold (2000), and of Resurrection (2001), in which two pairs of competing Aliens attempt to recover a forgotten Technology left behind by one of their races on Earth 3000 years earlier. Love interests also flourish. Seeker (2015) is the first book in a Young Adult fantasy trilogy. [JC]
Robb, John
Pseudonym of UK author Norman Robson (1917-1993) whose Space Beam (1952) is an unpretentious Space Opera. [JC]
Webb, Don
(1960- ) US author and high school English teacher who began to publish sf with "Rhinestone Manifesto" in Interzone #13, Autumn 1985. His first book, Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book (coll 1987), winner of the Fiction Collective Award, declared his capacity for formal inventiveness and his technical affinities for the literary avant garde. A native Texan, Webb was educated at the University of Texas at Austin, and has published three ...
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 ...