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Wednesday 13 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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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Ogawa Yōko
(1962- ) Japanese author, active from the late 1980s. Of her prolific output, the 1990 title story of The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (coll trans Stephen Snyder from various sources 2008) won the Shirley Jackson Award for 2008. She is of sf interest for Hisoyaka na kesshō (1994; trans Stephen Snyder as The Memory Police 2019), a somewhat abstract but intensely narrated Dystopian tale set in ...
Scoops
UK small weekly tabloid magazine, 20 issues 10 February to 23 June 1934, published by C A Pearson Ltd, London, in the editorial department of Haydn Dimmock (1895-1955), editor of The Scout, though the managing editor was Bernard Buley (1899-1973). Scoops was intended as a Boys' Paper that would "transport its readers from the everyday happenings into the future"; whatever appeal it might have had for adults was not helped by the decision to use, ...
Bambaataa, Afrika
(1957- ). US musician and performer, sometimes credited with inventing "rap" as a musical style. Bambaataa's first single "Planet Rock" (1982) sampled "Trans-Europe Express" by Kraftwerk and added Bambaataa's vocals. Blending the designedly machinic, bloodless, north-European musical style with an impassioned African-American content, though perhaps a counter-intuitive step, was a brilliant move, and proved enormously influential on ...
Slow Glass
A glass-like substance based on Imaginary Science, which in effect has a refractive index so huge that light takes significant time – from seconds to many years – to pass through a sheet or block of the material. It thus functions as a limited Time Viewer. Bob Shaw coined the term in his fine story "Light of Other Days" (August 1966 Analog), where slow-glass ...
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 ...