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Saturday 12 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 7 July 2025
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Levy, Joseph Hiam
(1838-1913) UK economist, journalist and author, active from before 1870, in politics a radical individualist whose later arguments prefigure American thought many years later (see Libertarian SF), and which led him to oppose vaccination and other social measures (in this, too, he prefigured later positions). An Individualist's Utopia (1912) presents in lightly fictionalized terms a Utopia drawn up on these lines, ...
McMullan, Thomas
(? - ) Scottish teacher, journalist and author resident in England. The protagonist of his first novel, The Last Good Man (2020), which is set in the Near Future after a pervasive Pandemic-like planetary Disaster, escapes a disintegrating City to visit the remote village where his cousin lives. Impossibly placid and twee, ...
Perimeter
Videogame (2004). K-D Lab (KDL). Designed by Andrey Kuzmin, Yulia Shaposhnikova, Michail Piskounov. Platforms: Win. / Perimeter is a Real Time Strategy game, set in a sequence of sub-worlds located in a region known as the Psychosphere (or, in a less felicitous translation from the original Russian, the Sponge). The Psychosphere is a separate layer of reality, one in which human fears and dreams become ...
Lost Worlds
This rubric covers Lost Races, lost Cities, lost lands and Islands: all the enclaves of mystery in a rapidly shrinking world that featured so largely in the sf of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This subgenre was obviously a successor to the Fantastic Voyages of the eighteenth century and earlier, but there are important distinctions to be drawn. The ...
Yerex, Cuthbert
Pseudonym of Canadian-born author Mary Estella Yerex (1867-1947), in the US from an undetermined point after 1883, when she married Arthur Cuthbert in Ontario; her Christopher Brand: Looking Forward (1934) is a relatively late response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), in which the abolition of money, and other radical solutions, ends the Great Depression. [JC]
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 ...