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Sunday 14 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Janvier, Thomas A
(1849-1913) US journalist and author, whose Lost Worlds novel, The Aztec Treasure House: A Romance of Contemporaneous Antiquity (1890), didactically describes a surviving remnant of the Aztec empire. In The Women's Conquest of New York [for subtitle see Checklist] (dated 1953 but 1894 chap) as by A Member of the Committee of Safety of 1908, Tammany Hall misguidedly enfranchises females, who run amok in ...
Fairburn, Edwin
(1827-1911) New Zealand land surveyor, painter and author whose sf novel, The Ships of Tarshish: Being a Sequel to the "Wandering Jew" (1867 [but see Checklist]) as by Mohoao, which may be the first published novel by a native of New Zealand, is a kind of Future War tale in which an English descendant of the Wandering Jew saves beleaguered Britain with his futuristic ironclads (see ...
Smith, William Hawley
(1845-1922) US educator and author whose first novel, The Evolution of "Dodd," in His Struggle for the Survival of the Fittest in Himself: Tracing his Chances, his Changes, and How He Came Out (1884) [see Checklist for vt and other data], examines Social Darwinism cursorily. Of sf interest is very Near Future The Promoters: A Novel without a Woman (1904), whose shady protagonists hope to apply to ...
Huntley, Tim
(1939-2019) US author of an sf novel, One on Me (1980), which describes a Utopian world whose citizenry, packed into Keeps, has room for only one more child, the protagonist. Three further novels – the Earthgame sequence, all signed Timothy Wade Huntley and comprising Earthgame: A Player's Guide (1999), Tidwell's Spirit (2002), and The Great God Awshi (2006) – are ...
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 ...