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Wednesday 11 March 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 9 March 2026
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Dooner, Pierton W
(1844-1907) Canadian-born editor and author who immigrated to the USA in 1861. His Near Future tale, Last Days of the Republic (1880), was the first US Yellow Peril novel that could be described in sf terms, and demonstrates the terribly common dynamic by which a guilty party, or nation, feels compelled to transfer its guilt to the victim or victim-nation: in 1880, the year of the book's publication, Chinese coolies ...
Bujold, Lois McMaster
(1949- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Barter" for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, March/April 1985. Almost all her published sf work is part of a loose series of often humorous adventures set in a future of feuding galactic colonies connected by Faster-than-Light "Wormhole jumps". Most of these stories feature members of ...
Smith, Evelyn E
(1922-2000) US crossword-puzzle compiler and author, who wrote at least five gothic romances as by Delphine C Lyons, some of which were supernatural; she began publishing sf with "Tea Tray in the Sky" in Galaxy for September 1952, and for about a decade published actively in the magazines; after about 1960 she appeared there only infrequently. For her crossword story "BAXBR/DAXBR" (in Time to Come, anth 1954, ed August ...
Bettersworth, Alexander Pitts
(1830-1903) US author whose anonymous The Strange Ms by _______ MD (1883) presents a manuscript, seemingly composed in 1881, which predicts a worldwide Disaster in a very Near Future 1884, when a Comet strikes the earth, creating vast fire storms, shifting the world's axis, melting the polar ice, eliminating almost all humans. A few survivors trek north to Canada, where they hope to mate and ...
Norway
Norway, along with the other Scandinavian countries, has always been somewhat isolated from the main roads of European cultural development, and never more so than during the eighteenth century, when the Age of Enlightenment swept across the rest of Europe. Outside the mainly French-speaking courts, Scandinavia was poor and starving, mainly agricultural, and crushed by repeated, ruinous wars. It is perhaps not surprising that excursions into fantastic literature were few: Scandinavia had ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...