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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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Sowden, Lewis
(1903-1974) UK-born South African newspaperman and author, in Israel from 1966, whose The Man Who Was Emperor: A Romance (1946) is set in an imaginary country of marginal sf interest. Tomorrow's Comet: A Tale of our own Times (July-August 1949 Blue Book as "Star of Doom"; 1951) deals with the End of the World in psychological terms. [JC/PN]
Browne, Howard
(1908-1999) US author and editor who worked 1942-1947 for Ziff-Davis where, among other responsibilities, he was managing editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, then under Raymond A Palmer's editorship. He contributed stories to the magazines, two serials about the Tarzan-like prehistoric adventurer Tharn being ...
Fleming, Ian
(1908-1964) UK author, brother of Peter Fleming; he spent World War Two working for UK naval intelligence, and it may be that the depth of his personal knowledge gave him the imaginative freedom to create his great mythic hero. Neither the occasional use of advanced technological gadgetry nor the chthonic and fantastic plots of his enormously successful James Bond sequence of thrillers, of course, makes them genuine sf. The closest any of them comes to a ...
Brainticket
Minor European prog-rock group founded by Belgian/Swiss musician Joel Vandroogenbroeck. Psychonaut (1973) seems to develop some sort of Inner Space sf theme, although the lyrics are hard to follow. The concept-album Celestial Ocean (1974) gives uninspiring musical life to the genre cliché that the Ancient Egyptians were also interstellar astronauts (see Ancient Egypt in SF; ...
Babcock, George
(1863-1942) US clothier, real estate agent, and author whose sole work of sf interest is Yezad: A Romance of the Unknown (1922), a not entirely competent but decidedly complicated tale in which occult and sf modes intermingle. A pilot named Bacon flies too high, and is dashed to Earth by Azrael, only to find that, in something like his astral body, and accompanied by his dark Doppelganger, he has begun a ...
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 ...