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Friday 5 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Awards
The following genre-related awards receive detailed individual entries in this encyclopedia: / Aelita Award (Russia) Andre Norton Award: see Nebula. Arthur C Clarke Award (for novels) British Fantasy Award (1966-1969) BSFA Award ...
Ketterer, David
(1942- ) UK academic and author (with a DPhil from the University of Sussex); based for many years at Concordia University, Montreal; now in the UK. His New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (1974) interestingly, though utilizing a rather academic terminology, links apocalyptic themes in US Mainstream literature with similar obsessions in ...
Main, Carol
(? - ) UK author of Young Adult novels, including the Fraser Family sequence, comprising The White Planet (1982), Planet of Evil (1983) and Planet of Adventure (1986), featuring lightly sketched Space Opera adventures on various planets; echoes of the Robinsonade are also lightly sketched in. ...
Dearmer, Geoffrey
(1893-1996) UK author, and a World War One poet of some note, his best early work being collected in Poems (coll 1918 chap), which he much later reassembled, with later material, as A Pilgrim's Song (coll 1993). He is now also remembered for his work (1936-1950) as an Examiner of Plays (which is to say censor) for the Lord Chancellor's Office, and for an incident in 1942, when he thought he heard the word "bugger" spoken in a ...
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 ...