SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 July 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 14 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Wright, Vincent
(? -? ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond his sf novel, An Ancient Englishman: A D 1599-1906 [for subtitle see Checklist below] (1907), structured as the memoir of Geoffrey Grenville, a sixteenth-century warrior Hero. After battling the Spanish on land and sea, he comes to London, where the Earl of Southampton introduces him to William Shakespeare, to whom he recounts his ...
Colonization of Other Worlds
The idea of colonizing the other worlds of our solar system has had an uncertain history because the optimism of sf writers has constantly been subverted and contradicted by the discoveries of Astronomy. The attractions of the idea have, however, always overridden cautionary pessimism, and the reluctant acceptance of the inhospitability of local planets has served only to increase interest in colonizing the worlds of other stars (see ...
Wallis, Redmond
(1933- ) New Zealand author active from the early 1960s whose Young Adult Triangulum sequence comprising Starbloom (1989) and The Mills of Space (1989) faces its young protagonists with Space Opera challenges, as an Alien civilization threatens Earth with a deadly Drug. [JC]
Underground [Game]
Role Playing Game (1993). Mayfair Games (MG). Designed by Ray Winninger. / Underground is a game in which all the worst fears of US Democrats in the 1990s are brought to life. In this vision of the early twenty-first century, weaponized superhumans turned petty criminals terrorize the cities of a corrupted America. The world is locked in a second Cold War, a hostile stand off between the North American, ...
Spence, Catherine Helen
(1825-1910) Scottish-born author, in Australia from 1839, where she was a central literary figure for more than half a century; her first novel, Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever (1854), was the first novel by an Australian woman to be set in Australia; An Agnostic's Progress from the Known to the Unknown (1884) is an afterlife allegory. She wrote two works of sf interest. Handfasted (written circa 1879; 1984), a ...
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 ...