SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 26 September 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 21 September 2026
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Jane, Fred T
(1865-1916) UK editor, illustrator and author, best known for founding the Jane's Fighting Ships series (as Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships from 1898; as Jane's Fighting Ships from 1905). Blake of the "Rattlesnake", or The Man Who Saved England: A Story of Torpedo Warfare in 189– (1895) is a Future War story in which, through a series of engagements, modern torpedoes save the UK from the Russians and ...
Chesterton, Rupert
(? -? ) UK author, active for perhaps two decades from around 1907. In his only work of any sf interest – the Phantom series comprising The Phantom Battleship (1911) and The Captain of the "Phantom": The Further Adventures of Captain Vanstone of the "Phantom" Battleship (1921) – the valiant British naval officer Vanstone captains a mystery ship, with advanced Weapons, initially on behalf ...
Somerson, Paul
(1950-2018) US technical author and computer journalist in various staff and editorial roles at the Ziff-Davis magazines MacUser, PC Magazine and PC/Computing (as editor-in-chief 1991-2000); later an antiques dealer. He is of sf interest for two collections of Computer-related sf tales for younger readers (see Children's SF), both written in collaboration with Stephen ...
VRMMORPG
Acronym for Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game; the shorter form VRMMO is also used. Though now an emerging real-world technology, the term in this encyclopedia primarily denotes a subgenre of fiction centered on immersive virtual game worlds and their social, psychological, and ontological consequences. Typically set in Near Future societies, such works feature players entering persistent shared ...
Crace, Jim
Working name of UK journalist and author James Crace (1946- ), who began publishing fantasy with "Annie, California Plates" in The New Review for June 1974. His first novel, Continent (coll of linked stories 1986), is a Fabulation set on an imaginary southern continent in an otherwise present-day world; it won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize. Crace's spare narrative ...
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 ...