SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 16 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 11 February 2025
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Skaife, S H
(1889-1976) UK-born entomologist and author, in South Africa from 1913; most of his work comprises either technical studies or descriptions of the natural world for general readers. Of sf interest is The Strange Old Man (coll of linked stories 1930), tales in which the Drug-enabled Miniaturization of two children allows them, under the guidance of the eponymous scientist, to tour the air, the land, and ...
McConnell, James V
(1925-1990) US biologist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Life Sentence" for Galaxy Science Fiction in January 1953, and who in 1959 founded a science magazine-cum-Fanzine, The Worm Runner's Digest, in which alongside scientific papers (in particular on planarian worms, his speciality) he published spoofs and Satires. Many of these are assembled as ...
Kyle, David A
(1919-2016) US sf fan, illustrator, owner of several radio stations, publisher and author. Kyle was a member of First Fandom, having been active in the field since 1933. Until the 1970s his writing activities were only occasional, though his first published sf was "Golden Nemesis" – which he also illustrated – for Stirring Science Stories in February 1941. (He had in fact sold this five years earlier and ...
Ertz, Susan
(1887-1985) UK author of popular novels, very probably pseudonymous, active for much of the century and perhaps now most famous for one quote from her novel Anger in the Sky (1943): "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." Her Scientific Romance, Woman Alive (1935), borrows wholesale from John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain ...
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 ...