SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 10 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Multiverse
Term originally coined outside sf as an alternative to "universe" that supposedly avoided any presupposition of a unique and ordered creation. Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), collected in his Will to Believe (coll 1897): "Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe." This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William ...
Woods, Margaret L
(1856-1945) UK poet and author, of some sf interest for The Invader (1907) a tale involving enforced Identity Transfer; the invading personality eventually destroys the tame protagonist through marriage-destroying wild behaviour. Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1915) is Fantasy. [JC]
Gilliam, Richard
(? - ) US author and editor who began to publish work of genre interest with "Caroline and Caleb" in Confederacy of the Dead (anth 1993), which he edited in collaboration with Martin H Greenberg and Edward E Kramer. Many further anthologies followed, mostly with Greenberg and often a third collaborator. Exceptions not involving Greenberg are ...
New Worlds
Long the leading UK sf magazine (and an Original-Anthology series for two sections of its chequered career), publishing 222 issues during a span of 51 years ([July] 1946-August 1997), but including a 12-year hiatus. New Worlds, though it had volume numbers up to #177, has always been numbered consecutively (in its magazine incarnations); the first five were undated. / New Worlds was a development from a pre-World War Two ...
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 ...