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Monday 19 October 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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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Xenobiology
The study of lifeforms that may exist elsewhere than on Earth is called xenobiology or exobiology. It is one of the few legitimate sciences to have, as yet, no direct experimental application other than the tests carried out on the surface of Mars to see if the soil showed any of the biological activity that might be associated with the presence of microscopic lifeforms. (It seemed for a time as if some of the results of this experiment might be positive; it is now thought they were caused by ...
Wyatt, Rachel
(1929- ) UK-born dramatist and author, in Canada from 1957; of some sf interest is her first novel, The String Box (1970), set in a surrealized but seemingly Near Future City (see Absurdist SF) whose inhabitants follow maddening sets of rules to survive; possession of the eponymous box counts enormously. [JC]
Appleman, Mark J
(1917-1989) US businessman and author whose sf Satire, The Liberation of Manhattan (1949) with Edmund DeMaitre, comically depicts the invasion of New York by its Soviet liberators. [JC]
Knudtsen, Ingar, Jr
(1944-2025) One of Norway's most popular and productive sf authors, with thirty books to his credit. Since childhood he had been interested in astronomy and space exploration, and always did his best to keep the scientific details in his writing as correct as possible. His style was highly visual, with short, descriptive sentences which efficiently moved the story forward. He often wrote from a Feminist point of view, many of the ...
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 ...