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Sunday 22 June 2025
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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Barbusse, Henri
(1873-1935) French author, best known for his strongly realistic fiction, especially that concerning World War One. Les enchaînements (1925 2vols; trans Stephen Haden Guest as Chains 1925 2vols) attempts – like many novels from the first third of the century – to present a panoramic vision of mankind's prehistory and history, in this case through the transcendental experiences of a single protagonist who is struck ...
Ohlson, Hereward
(1907-1955) UK author of the Thunderbolt Children's SF sequence comprising Thunderbolt of the Spaceways (1954) and Thunderbolt and the Rebel Planet: The Captain of the Spaceways Leads an Expedition to the Strange World of Pluvius (1954), both being undemanding Space Operas. [JC]
Brown, Chester
(1960- ) Canadian creator of Yummy Fur, a fantasy Comic whose stories lurch from one comics Taboo to another: Religion, homosexuality, Vampires, Zombies, masturbation and a full spectrum of bodily excretions. Yummy Fur began life as a series of tiny (A6) self-published pamphlets in the early 1980s. Brown was eventually ...
Pavlou, Stel
(1970- ) UK screenwriter and author who did the script for The 51st State (2001), about a Drug fifty-one times more powerful than anything previously marketed; of more direct sf interest is Decipher (2001), set in Near Future Antarctica, where drillers discover a new Power Source, arousing Aliens from space while ...
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 ...