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Friday 20 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. ...
Oates, Joyce Carol
(1938- ) US author who has also written as by Fernandes, Lauren Kelly and Rosamond Smith. Her immensely prolific career – at least seventy-seven novels; somewhere approaching 1000 short stories, many of them long and ambitious, most but not all assembled in forty or more collections; plus fifty plays and much other work – has in itself been a barrier to her proper appreciation. In recent years, however, despite its almost unassimilable and unremitting growth, ...
Pick, J B
(1921-2015) UK scholar, poet and author, for many years a specialist in the work of David Lindsay, editing several of his works; The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (anth 1970; vt The Haunted Man 1979) with Colin Wilson and E H Visiak conveys a strongly sympathetic view of the author. Pick's own fiction includes A Land Fit for 'Eros (1957) with John ...
Carcosa
1. Carcosa House was a fan-run US specialist publishing house formed to produce the first book edition of Edison's Conquest of Mars (1947) by Garrett P Serviss. No further books appeared. / 2. The name Carcosa (not Carcosa House) was used for a different Small Press founded in 1973 under the direction of David Drake and Karl Edward ...
Smith, Dick
(1922-2014) US visual effects expert active from the 1950s through the 1990s in both films and Television in various genres; he is of particular importance for Horror and sf projects. Pursuing a career in make-up after US Army service during World War Two, Smith spent several years trying to break into Cinema before beginning work in the late 1950s for the newer medium ...
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 ...