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Thursday 21 May 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.
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de Wailly, Gaston
(1857-1943) French playwright and author, who sometimes signed as Commandant G de Wailly; though his dramas have been generally forgotten, his several sf novels, all cast in a Vernian mode (see Jules Verne), are of some interest. The most successful may be Le Meurtrier du globe (feuilleton format 15 May-23 October 1910 Journal de Voyages as by Commandant G de Wailly; 1925; trans Brian Stableford ...
Hodder-Williams, Christopher
(1926-1995) UK author, pilot, composer and sound engineer; a member of the family which owned and managed his main early publisher. His first novel, The Cummings Report (1957) as by James Brogan, was not sf. Hodder-Williams began publishing sf with Chain Reaction (1959), which concerns itself, as does almost all of his fiction, with the relationship between Man and the machine Technology he has created, in this case through a mystery ...
Starflight
Videogame (1986). Binary Systems (BS). Platforms: DOS (1986); Amiga, C64 (1989); AtariST, Mac (1990); MegaDrive (1991). / Starflight is perhaps best described as a two-dimensional Computer Role Playing Game set on a starship. The game begins on a planet known as Arth, which is inhabited by a mix of species, including humans. A spacecraft of unknown origin has recently been ...
Ole Luk-Oie
The best-known pseudonym of India-born UK military thinker and author Ernest Dunlop Swinton (1868-1951), who served in various capacities in the UK army from 1888 until he retired in 1919 with the rank of Major-General. His first book, The Defence of Duffer's Drift: A Few Experiences in Field Defence for Detached Posts Which May Prove Useful in Our Next War (1904 chap) as by Backsight Forethought, is couched as a sequence of fantasticated dreams in which Lieutenant Forethought ...
Cravens, Gwyneth
(1944- ) US author of The Black Death (1977) with John S Marr, then head of the New York City Bureau of Communicable Diseases, about a Near Future Disaster in which the eponymous plague (see Pandemic) is transmitted unknowingly by a young woman; it was filmed as Quiet Killer (1992). ...
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 ...