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Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Samuel, Viscount
(1870-1963) UK politician, of progressive Liberal principles, and author; he was born Herbert Louis Samuel, knighted 1920, and made Viscount Samuel on 8 June 1937. His somewhat humourless public personality was satirized by H G Wells in The New Machiavelli (1911), and the notoriously antisemitic Hilaire Belloc also attacked him, accusing him falsely of corruption, which forced him to sue, successfully, for libel. As ...
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 ...
Defying Gravity
American-Canadian tv series (2009). British Broadcasting Corporation, Fox Television Studios, and Omni Film Productions for CTV, SPACE and ProSieben. Created by James D Parriot. Producers include Michael Chechik and Michael Edelstein. Writers include Parriot, Sheri Elwood, Meredith Lavender, and Marcie Ulin. Directors include Sturla Gunnarsson, David Straiton, Peter Howitt, Fred Gerber, and Jeff Woolnough. Cast includes Ron Livingston as Maddux Donner, Laura Harris as Zoe Barnes, Malik ...
Hinde, Thomas
Pseudonym of UK author Thomas Willes Chitty (1926-2014), whose career as a novelist extends from 1952, when he was not very plausibly associated with the "Angry Young Men" (more a journalistic invention than a literary movement) which included Kingsley Amis and Colin Wilson. Ninety Double Martinis (1963), understandable as Fantastika though not explicitly, anatomizes an extremely ...
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 ...