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Wednesday 16 July 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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Dark Worlds
Canadian Small Press Retro-Pulp magazine published by Dark Worlds Club, British Columbia, and edited by G W Thomas and M D Jackson. It saw four quarterly issues, from Summer 2008 to Spring 2009, with two annual issues since. It is deliberately imitative of the pulp magazines, in its size, format and content, reminiscent of Startling Stories with a touch of ...
Long Night
Term used by Poul Anderson in his Technic History sequence to denote the galactic Dark Ages expected after the fall of a Terran Galactic Empire already mired in Decadence, a narrative of Decline and Fall and the Darkness to come that comprises a central thread in the megatext (see SF Megatext) of the West, as exemplified in the twentieth century by Arnold J ...
Neville, Kris
(1925-1980) US author – mostly of fiction – who worked for many years as a technical writer specializing in plastics technology, and through his connection with the Epoxylite Corporation co-authored several texts on epoxy resins. He began publishing sf with "The Hand from the Stars" (July 1949 Super Science Stories), and for several years was a prolific contributor to The ...
Schisgall, Oscar
(1901-1984) Russian-born editor and author, in USA from an early age; extremely prolific in short forms, with at least 4,000 stories and articles credited, many of them for the Reader's Digest. He is of sf interest for the Baron Ixell sequence which appeared in Clues from 1927 to 1932, beginning with "The Circle of Terror" (July 1927 Clues) and ending with "The Crime of the Century" (October 1932 Clues); Baron Ixell: Crime Breaker (coll 1929) ...
Kindberg, Tim
(? - ) UK computer scientist and author who is of moderate sf interest for his first novel, The Vampires of Avonmouth (2021), an Equipoisal tale featuring a sea-borne Invasion of untraditional Vampires – energy eaters rather than blood suckers – in distant Near Future suburban Bristol (see ...
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 ...