SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Galaxy Online
A website, based in Westlake Village, California, which went live as a pilot on 1 January 2000 and was planned by founder Douglas E Conway as "the largest science-fiction and science-fact-related Interactive Online Network in the universe." The backbone of the website was Galaxy Pictures which, according to the press release, had already amassed "the largest library in the world of science-fiction and science-related shows for internet broadcast." Conway based the website on ...
von Neupauer, Josef
(1806-1902) Austrian politician and author whose sf novel, Österreich im Jahre 2020 ["Austria in the Year 2020"] (1893), describes Mr Forest's journey to Austria in 2020, guided by Julian West from Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). Austria, now a monarchical Utopia, is run on communist lines, with women's rights established to a degree (see ...
Mitchison, Naomi
(1897-1999) Scottish polemicist and author who married G R "Dick" Mitchison just before his return to the front; her own World War One service, as an auxiliary nurse, included caring for him in a French hospital; sister of J B S Haldane. She was known mainly for her work outside the sf field, which she entered late; her bibliography [see links below] includes over 100 books and over ...
Macrostructures
An unfailingly popular theme in sf is the discovery, usually by humans, of vast enigmatic constructions – macrostructures or Big Dumb Objects – in space or on other planets. As a rule these have been built by a mysterious, now-disappeared race of Alien intellectual giants (see Forerunners) and humans can only guess at their purpose, though the very fact of being confronted by such ...
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 ...