SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 27 April 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 21 April 2025
Sponsor of the day: Janine G Stinson
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Bi'en Fū
Pseudonym of Princess Fukuko Asaka (1941-2009) a Japanese sf author better known as the second cousin of Emperor Hirohito. A great grand-daughter of the same Meiji Emperor whose restoration ushered in Japan's modern era, Asaka lost her title during a 1947 pruning of the imperial family tree conducted by US Occupation authorities. Her pseudonym Bi'en Fū (literally: "Beauty Garden") was used in several stories printed in Takumi ...
Davis, Brett
(? - ) US newspaper reporter from 1989, with Aerospace Daily (2001-2005) and subsequently with backfence.com, whose Bone Wars sequence of sf novels, Bone Wars (1998) and Two Tiny Claws (1999), amusingly sets two historical nineteenth-century paleontologists – Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) and Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899) – against each other in Montana in a search for ...
Parsons, Lucy
(1851-1942) US political agitator, labour organizer, editor and author, born a slave. She was for many years most recognized as the wife of the white anarchist Albert Parsons (1848-1886), who was executed on a trumped-up charge of murder during the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago; but her own considerable stature has gradually gained attention. Most of Parsons's work is nonfiction, but one tale, "Communistic Monopoly" (March 1886 The Alarm), conveys its protagonist into the ...
Jenks, William
(1778-1866) US clergyman and author whose Future History, Memoir of the Northern Kingdom, Written, A D 1872 [for full title see Checklist below] (dated 1901 but 1808), describes the world as of the date of its claimed composition. Politics dominates the account. America has been split into three parts: the Southern States, now a monarchy under the influence of France; the Northern States, at peace with Canada due ...
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 ...