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Saturday 11 April 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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Belot, Adolphe
(1829-1890) Guadeloupe-born French playwright and author of popular fiction, mostly melodramatic, and probably too "racy" to be publishable in English during his lifetime. He is known in translation only for the Miss Poles sequence comprising La Sultane parisienne (1877) and La Vénus Noire: Voyage Dans l'Afrique Central (1877; trans George D Cox as The Black Venus: A Tale of the Dark Continent 1881), both volumes having been translated ...
England, Barry
(1932-2009) UK playwright and author whose first novel, Figures in a Landscape (1968), is a chase thriller set in a surreal unnamed South American country; it was filmed as Figures in a Landscape (1970) directed by Joseph Losey. His second novel, No Man's Land (1997), is a Post-Holocaust military thriller focused on a brigade of soldiers in a burnt-out environment who rescue some innocents and kill many who are not, ...
Jarry, Alfred
(1873-1907) French author who carried the fruits of his scientific education into his surreal avant-garde writing, particularly the influence of the French evolutionary philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Jarry's famous play Ubu roi [for subtitle see Checklist] (performed 1896; 1896; trans 1951) and its several sequels including "Ubu enchaîné" (1900 Revue Blanche; trans B Keith and G Legman as King Turd 1953) – helped found the ...
Montague, Charles Howard
(1858-1889) US editor, journalist and author whose Two Strokes of the Bell: A Strange Story (1886) deals melodramatically with Amnesia in a supernatural frame. Of more sf interest is The Doctor's Mistake: Or What Myrta Saw: An Experiment with a Life (1888) with Clement Milton Hammond, where a complexly melodramatic plot – at least one Reincarnation seems to ...
Sugar, Andrew
(? -? ) US author of whom nothing is known beyond his authorship of the Enforcer sequence of action thrillers beginning with The Enforcer (1973). The sf element in individual stories is sometimes minimal, though the underlying premise is sf: the protagonist Jason, caught in a body dying of cancer, is employed by an Institute which offers him new but temporary bodies (see Identity Transfer), each of them ...
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 ...