SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 1 February 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.
Site updated on 26 January 2026
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Rabe, Jean
(1957-2026) US game designer, author and editor who began to publish work of genre interest with "Grandfather's Toys" in Realms of Valor (anth 1993) edited by James Lowder, an anthology tied to the Forgotten Realms Shared World. Much of Rabe's work is tied to other fantasy and supernatural franchises such as Dragonlance and Rogue Angel [see Checklist below]; contributions to the latter sequence appear as by Alex ...
Erisman, Fred
(1937- ) US academic and author of nonfiction work on American popular fiction, concentrating on the Western and on children's literature, though he has written on sf topics in Extrapolation and elsewhere. He is of sf interest primarily for two studies. Boys' Books, Boys' Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight (2006) (see Airplane Boys; Airship Boys) ...
Hough, Emerson
(1857-1923) US author whose first book, The Singing Mouse Stories (coll 1895), is Fantasy, though most of his subsequent works were Westerns of a literary bent, like The Covered Wagon (1922), and including Mother of Gold (1924), in which Psi Powers (in this case scrying) guide the protagonists to an Aztec Lost World, though they find ...
Killus, James P
(1950-2008) US chemist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Son of ETAOIN SHRDLU: More Adventures in Type and Space" for Asimov's with Sharon N Farber, Susanna Jacobson and Dave Stout in June 1981, publishing about twenty stories in all, most of them more ambitious than this initial vignette. His first novel, Book of Shadows (1983), is fantasy; his second, Sunsmoke (1985), undemandingly combines sf and fantasy in a ...
Timescape Books
US sf publishing imprint, issuing both hardcover and paperback, whose logo first appeared in March 1981 and whose last titles were published in 1984. Timescape Books was formed by Simon and Schuster and Pocket Books (owned by the former), for both of whom David G Hartwell had been director of sf, and he was set in charge of the new imprint. It was named after the resonant title of Gregory Benford's successful novel ...
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 ...