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
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Holloway, Michael
(1952- ) US author whose Near Future novel, Empath (1993), treats the AIDS crisis in medical Technothriller terms; during the course of the tale, the cure finally becomes available. [JC]
Wilkie, J
(? -? ) UK author of The Vision of Nehemiah Sintram (1902), a Dystopia depicting an Underground world ruled by a Satan-like figure, who may in fact be Satan. Sintram himself, and his vision of a hellish landscape, seems to have been based on Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Sintram und seine Gefahrten: eine nordische Erzahlung nach Albrecht Durer (1815; various trans ...
Matter Penetration
The ability to walk through walls or be otherwise transported through solid matter is a wish-fulfilment fantasy less prevalent than Invisibility, perhaps owing to its greater scientific implausibility. The first sf example is perhaps "The Ray of Displacement" (October 1903 The Metropolitan Magazine) by Harriet Prescott Spofford, whose titular Ray diffuses an individual's atoms and ...
Benét, Stephen Vincent
(1898-1943) US author and poet, active from before 1915, very briefly involved in World War One until his myopia was discovered; brother of William Rose Benét. He was initially most noted for his moderately copious Poetry, including an Arabian fantasy, The Drug-Shop; Or, Endymion in Edmonstoun (1917 chap). The earliest examples of poems with direct sf interest are probably ...
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 ...