SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 22 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Hammond, Aubrey
(1894-1940) UK set designer, art director and illustrator, well known in these capacities; in active service during World War One. His first film as art director, Hyde Park Corner (1935), directed by Sinclair Hill, is Fantasy. Hammond is of importance as an sf illustrator almost solely for one work, his remarkably strong wraparound Art Deco cover for the first English translation of Thea ...
Vizzini, Ned
(1981-2013) US journalist and author born Edward Vizzini (name legally changed) who committed Suicide due to profound clinical depression; much of his nonfiction work, assembled in Teen Angst? Naaah (coll 2000), deals in various ways with the ways this illness afflicts adolescents and young men and women, as does his second novel, the nonfantastic It's Kind of a Funny Story (2006). His first novel, the ...
King, Reed
Pseudonym of unidentified US author (? - ) whose only publication under this name, FKA USA (2019), is a gonzo distant Near Future tale set in a balkanized America and describing a road-trip from what was once Missouri, but is now Crunch, United Colonies, to California. In 2085, all the Climate-Change and Ecological ...
Nova Express
US Amateur Magazine published by White Car Publications, Houston, Texas, edited by Michael Sumbera to #12 (Fall/Winter 1992) and thereafter by Lawrence Person. 22 issues from Spring 1987 to Summer 2002, originally three per year but irregular from 1990 on. It began inauspiciously, calling itself the "'Zine of the Avant Garde", stating it wished to "give people exposure" and determined to use the new technology to make the magazine something other than ...
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 ...