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Tuesday 9 June 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.
Site updated on 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Vulcan
This is the usual name given to an imagined planet within the orbit of Mercury, first proposed in 1859 by Urbain De Vernier to explain irregularities in Mercury's orbit (now understood to be an effect of Einstein's Theory of Relativity). Such a planet is observed in Donald W Horner's fanciful By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and His Friends (1910), and ...
Empson, William
(1906-1984) UK literary critic, theorist, poet and author, perhaps the most brilliant (and cantankerous) British thinker about literature in the twentieth century, most famously for Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; rev 1947), published just after he was stripped of his degree and normal academic career by Cambridge University for a sexual misdemeanour (a condom was discovered in his rooms), and for Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), whose analysis of "Christ and ...
Alternity
Role Playing Game (1998). Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Designed by Bill Slavicsek, Richard Baker. / Alternity was an attempt to create a generic system for role playing in science fiction milieux. It had limited success commercially, though much of the background material was reused in d20 Modern (2002) (see d20). The Alternity core rules are not linked to any specific setting; instead, ...
Mad Max 2
Film (1981; vt The Road Warrior). Kennedy Miller Entertainment. Directed by George Miller. Written by Terry Hayes, Miller, Brian Hannant. Cast includes Mel Gibson, Emil Minty, Kjell Nilsson, Mike Preston and Bruce Spence. 96 minutes. Colour. / The success of the first film in this series, Mad Max (1979), generated a bigger budget for this, the second. It was well used, and this is a more sophisticated film, ...
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 ...