SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 1 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.
Site updated on 28 September 2026
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
May, Peter
(1951-2026) Scottish journalist, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970; resident in France from around 2000. During the first twenty-five years of his career as a screenwriter, he was involved in something like 1,000 television productions, all seemingly nonfantastic. He began to publish fiction with The Reporter (1978), which he serialized for the BBC; most of his later novels were crime thrillers, including the China Thrillers beginning with ...
Armytage, W H G
(1915-1998) South-African born author and professor of education, in the UK from well before World War Two; he published several articles with an sf focus in journals such as Extrapolation and Riverside Quarterly. Of interest to sf readers among his fourteen books is Yesterday's Tomorrows: A Historical Survey of Future Societies (1968). Primarily concerned with literary versions of the shape the ...
Long, Jeff
(1951- ) US author, initially of mountaineering novels, who made his genre debut with The Descent (1999). While including some mountaineering, this Horror thriller posits that the myth of Hell derives from a worldwide realm of Underground caverns inhabited by a Lost Race of "hadals". The hostile environment has caused many of these human-related cannibals to ...
Murphy, Robert Franklin
(? - ) US author of the Near Future Girl Factory sequence of erotized Technothrillers beginning with The Girl Factory (1975), featuring a team of Androids created to defend America from its foes. [JC]
McNeil, John
(1939-2004) UK entrepreneur, software developer and author of Little Brother (1983), a tale of sf Paranoia in which young children are ominously taken over by sinister Computers with rightwing agendas. [JC]
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 ...