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Thursday 19 February 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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Chetwynd, Bridget
(1910-1970) UK author, mother of Tom Chetwynd; in her sf novel, Future Imperfect (1946), women run the world (see Feminism), leaving men behind, though romantic elements intervene. [JC]
Haberfield, Bob
(1938-2021) Australian-born artist, long in the UK, sometimes wrongly credited as Bob Habberfield; first active in the early 1960s with record sleeve design and Illustration for the UK-based World Record Club. He was best known for his striking cover artwork for sf, fantasy and Science Fantasy titles published by the London-based Mayflower Books and Granada Publishing/Panther (the latter acquiring the former as an imprint ...
Davies, Pete
(1959- ) UK advertising copywriter (until the mid 1980s) and author whose first novel, The Last Election (1986), depicts with singular ferocity a Near-Future Dystopian UK ruled by the Money Party and its senile Nanny, a savage portrait of the 1980s British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher; Overpopulation and the total loss of a manufacturing base lead to the ...
Tops Comics
US Comic (1944). Consolidated Book Publishers. Number of issues discussed below. Artists and scriptwriters include Henry Boltinoff, Vic Herman, Albert Magarian, Florence Magarian and Rick Yager. The first issue (#2000) boasts it has 128 pages and describes itself as "four big comics books in one": the purchaser was apparently expected to remove the staples and fold the pages to create separate comics with their own (unnumbered) covers, each having a lead character with two stories plus filler ...
Zombies
Of the three chief classes of Supernatural Creature most popular in fantastic fiction – the others being Vampires and Werewolves – zombies seem the least supernatural and the most easily rationalized in sf terms, though at its origin the term clearly described an entirely supernatural entity, and was so understood in the late nineteenth century, when it was used by such authors as ...
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 ...