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Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Achilleos, Chris
(1947-2021) Working name of British artist Christos Achilléos, born in Famagusta, Cyprus; he moved to Britain at the age of twelve after his father died. After graduating from the Hornsey College of Art in 1969, Achilleos began receiving assignments to do book covers for British publishers; his covers for reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar novels were very unremarkable, but he displayed more creativity in works like his 1972 ...
Keneally, Thomas
(1935- ) Australian author best known for novels like Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) and Schindler's Ark (1982 UK, vt Schindler's List 1982), which won the Booker Prize and was filmed by Steven Spielberg, but who has several times edged into generic displacements in order to contain and express a remarkably intense and occasionally visionary imagination. His first novel, ...
Howes, Katelyn Monroe
(? - ) US documentary and Television producer, all of nonfantastic work, and author whose first novel, The Awoken (2022), re-invokes a question often found in the SF Megatext: why would anyone awoken from Suspended Animation be welcome in the new world? In this case, the protagonist has been re-activated into an estranging ...
Wright, R H
(1874-after 1920) Irish-born author, in New Zealand for part of his adult life, in active service during World War One after – it seems – having stopped writing; he is recorded as surviving the war. Of sf interest among his several books is The Outer Darkness (1906), an awkward but effective early exercise in Equipoise. The protagonist, having died, is transported to another planet, whose monarch ...
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 ...