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Wednesday 3 December 2025
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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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Mogridge, Stephen
(1915-1986) UK author of tales, usually in series, for children and Juvenile Series markets, who also wrote as by Jill Stevens, publishing in all over thirty titles in the 1950s and early 1960s. He is best known for the nonfantastic New Forest sequence; of sf interest is the Peter sequence, beginning with Peter and the Flying Saucers (1954) and ending with Peter's Denmark Adventure (1958). The sequence is undemanding, ...
Whiteford, Wynne N
(1915-2002) Australian motoring journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Beyond the Infinite" in Adam and Eve for 28 May 1934. He then fell silent until the mid-1950s, at which point he also began to sell to overseas markets, starting with "The Non-Existent Man" (July 1958 Amazing); after 1960, however, he did not sell to the American market for a quarter of a century. Whiteford's mature work turns ...
O'Leary, Brian
(1940-2011) US astronomer and author, formerly involved with NASA, and perhaps now best known for his assertion that NASA may have faked photographs of the Moon landing. His Near Future tale, Spaceship Titanic (1983) with Richard Duprey, depicts a Disaster on the hundredth space shuttle flight, which generates a life-or-death situation; the mission is saved. [JC]
Open Universe
In cosmology an open universe is a model of the Universe which implies that it will continue to expand forever; in this general sense, the term is found incidentally in many sf novels. However, sf readers also use it in a quite different meaning: to designate a work or series whose characters and venues may be made use of by fans and others in Fanzines without copyright restrictions (although the original authors do sometimes impose constraints). The best known open ...
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 ...