SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Mitsuse Ryū
Pseudonym of Kimio Iizuka (1928-1999) a Japanese author and founding member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan (SFWJ), much respected as a prose author and sometime poet in his lifetime, but now more likely to be remembered for popular Manga editions of his work, many of which feature human characters overwhelmed by the machinations of vastly superior intellects and technologies. With an interest in sf inspired by reading the ...
Young, Robert F
(1915-1986) US author who turned full-time after engaging in a number of menial occupations. His first sf story was "The Black Deep Thou Wingest" in Startling Stories for June 1953, and he published short work quite prolifically for the next three decades. Young was a slick, polished writer; his stories are readable, often superficial, but the best of them have some of the emotional force of the work of Ray Bradbury, ...
Morgan, D S
(? - ) UK author whose sf debut was the novel The Bend in the Sky (2012), a humorous Multiverse-traversing romp in which our universe must be saved by unlikely non-heroes from destruction by a psychopathic tyrant-Villain; there is some enjoyable incidental inventiveness, though perhaps over-much reliance on comic names distantly reminiscent of Douglas ...
Adams, Terry A
(1946- ) US author whose D'neeran Factor sequence – Sentience: A Novel of First Contact (1986), The Master of Chaos (1989) and Battleground (2013) – begins in the conflict between "true" humans and D'Neerans, who are human telepaths (see ESP; Telepathy), and builds into a Space-Opera sequence involving new races and challenges ...
Isle, Sue
Legal name until 2014 of Australian author Alex Isle (1963- ), who changed their gender identity in that year; work before 2014 is signed Sue Isle. They began to publish work of genre interest with "Nightwings" in Aurealis for April 1990. Most of their subsequent work, much of it sf, has been Young Adult, though Scale of Dragon, Tooth of Wolf (1996) is a coming-of-age fantasy, with ...
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 ...