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Saturday 6 December 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.
Site updated on 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
McIntee, David A
(1968-2024) UK author also active in Fandom and Convention-running, most of whose professional work has consisted of Ties to the Doctor Who universe, beginning with Doctor Who: The New Adventures: White Darkness (1993); this novel was based on his unproduced 1989 script for a three-part Doctor Who storyline set in 1927 and featuring ...
de Valda, F W
(1884-1964) UK entrepreneur, pilot and author of two sf novels: Children of the Sun (1934), in which ultra-short waves from a distant star, when projected onto a screen, work as a Time Viewer, giving contemporary humans visual access to Hernando Cortez's savage conquest of Mexico; and The Treasure of Atíl (1934), a Young Adult tale whose young protagonists use various ...
Dahl, Roald
(1916-1990) Welsh-born author of Norwegian parents who spent periods of his life in the USA, but lived in the UK in his later years; married to the actress Patricia Neal 1953-1983; he also wrote as by Pegasus. Though his enormous success as an author of children's stories has tended to dominate perceptions of his career, he was in fact long best known for his eerie, exquisitely crafted, somewhat poisonous adult tales, many of them fantasies, though the first of his collections, ...
Olympica
Board and counter Wargame (1978). Metagaming Concepts. Designed by Lynn Willis. / In Olympica a Hive Mind has spontaneously appeared in a communications Web used on twenty-third-century Mars, and is threatening to absorb a million human minds before expanding out into the solar system. Earth's United Nations orders a raid on a vital nexus of the Web Mind positioned in the caldera of the ...
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 ...