SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 8 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 ...
Givins, Robert C
(1845-1915) Canadian-born real estate developer (including a castle for himself in South Chicago) and author, in US from an early age; his romances were sometimes published as by Snivig C Trebor (his name spelled backwards). His one sf novel, A Thousand Miles an Hour (1913), might stand as a compendium of misunderstood science – examples being the concept of an aeroplane whose vertical screw allows it to remain still while the world turns, and the ...
Booth, Pat
(1929-2018) New Zealand newspaper journalist (chiefly with The Auckland Star), local-area politician and author, one of whose sixteen books is sf: Long Night Among the Stars (1961) sensitively depicts the human interactions of the crew of a Spaceship in the Near Future. This author should not be confused with the female Pat Booth (1943-2009) who wrote All for Love (1993), a medical fantasy ...
Theater Five
Radio series (1964-1965; vt Theatre-Five; vt Theater 5). ABC-Radio Network. Directors included Ted Bell, Harry Nelson and Warren Sommerville. Writers included Lillian Anderson, Sherman Dryer, Richard McCracken, Robert Newman, Saul Panitz, William N Robson and Lawrence Weinberg. Announcer and host: Fred Foy. 260 20-minute episodes, of which 256 episodes survive. / A late effort by ABC to revive US radio drama, ...
Sheng Keyi
(1973- ) Chinese author who came to writing as a mature student after late teens and twenties spent in a variety of professions. Her stories frequently dwell on the formative event of her teenage years – the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, which she observed first through the prism of state media, and only later came to appreciate as a moment of deeper resonance. / A strong thread of Feminism runs ...
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 ...