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Friday 20 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.
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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. ...
Super-Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine, 18 bimonthly issues December 1956 to October 1959, published by Headline Publications, New York, edited by W W Scott. Super-Science Fiction was a case of simply one magazine too many, coming in the final wave of interest in sf magazines at the end of the 1950s at a time when readers were already turning to the paperback. Scott, who had no experience in science fiction though he was an old-time Pulp magazine ...
Vaughn, S K
Pseudonym of an unidentified American (? - ) screenwriter and author of thrillers, whose sf debut under this name is Across the Void (2019), a Space Opera whose protagonist awakens, apparently suffering from Memory Edit or perhaps straightforward trauma, as her NASA-built ship is broken and she is alone, except expectedly for an attendant AI. Her task is ...
Masters, Anthony
(1940-2003) UK educator and author, active from about 1964; he was a prolific author of biographies; his eleven novels for adults are nonfantastic. Relatively early in his career, writing as Richard Tate, he published some deliberately exorbitant shockers, of which The Dead Travel Fast (1971) is of interest for its transgressive invasion of Dracula territory via a series of vampirish murders on a film set. Red Ice (1986) with Nicholas Barker is a ...
Hinz, Christopher
(1951- ) US author who made a considerable impact with the Paratwa sequence: Liege-Killer (1987) – which won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award for Best First Novel – Ash Ock (1989) and The Paratwa (1991). From the first, the sequence gives off a sense of professional polish and hurry, densely packing a wide variety of 1980s adventure-sf ...
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 ...