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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 ...
Cosy Catastrophe
A term coined by Brian W Aldiss in Billion Year Spree (1973) to describe the supposedly comforting ambience shed by the sort of Disaster tale told by UK writers like John Wyndham (see also Holocaust; Post-Holocaust). Though later critical work on Wyndham has emphasized the ambiguities and darknesses of his work, the ...
Terra
Common item of sf Terminology. In sf the Latin form is that conventionally given to the name of our planet, since Earth is ambiguous, meaning both the planet itself and soil – a point frequently made when Earth is sought in E C Tubb's Dumarest sequence: "As well call a planet Dirt, or Soil!" (The irony here is that the same ambiguity exists in Latin, where terra can mean anything from soil or the ground, as in ...
About, Edmond
(1828-1885) French dramatist, journalist, author of several novels of sf interest, though the first of these, Le Cas de M. Guérin ["The Case of Mr Guérin"] (1860) – about a pregnant man – has not appeared in English. He is best-known for L'Homme à l'Oreille Cassée (1862 2vols; trans anon as The Man with the Broken Ear 1864; new trans Henry Holt 1867; new trans J E Maitland vt Colonel Fougas' Mistake ...
Jackson, Basil
(1920- ) Welsh-born author, in Canada from 1948, who specialized in Technothrillers set either at the edge of the present, or in the very Near Future, beginning with Epicenter (1971), where Toronto is threatened by a very bad leak of radioactive material. Rage Under the Arctic (1974) concentrates on a sabotaged nuclear tanker submarine; in The Night Manhattan Burned ...
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 ...