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Thursday 19 February 2026
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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Stranger from Venus
Film (1954; vt Immediate Disaster; vt The Venusian US). Princess Pictures/Vitapix Corporation (US)/Rich and Rich Ltd. Produced by Burt Balaban and Gene Martel. Directed by Balaban. Written by Hans Jacoby from a story by Desmond Leslie. Cast includes Helmut Dantine, Cyril Luckham and Patricia Neal. 75 minutes. Black and white. / Driving near a small English village, Susan North (Neal) is distracted by something descending to earth; she ...
Dane, John Colin
(? -? ) US author whose sf novel Champion (1907) is narrated by a sentient car (see Machines), which or who recounts various adventures among humans, following a tradition – begun as early as Tobias Smollett's The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769 2vols) – that generates opportunities for Satire, vicarious ...
Aylett, Steve
(1967- ) UK author who very quickly developed a reputation for his tone of voice, which could be described as gonzo, surreal, metacyberpunkish, riff-driven, surfer-noir; it is a voice which sometimes obscures the objects of his tales, which attack the objects of their Satire through vignettes, quotes and characters from the Pulp magazines and Comics of the previous century. He began ...
Cosy Catastrophe
A term coined by Brian W Aldiss in Billion Year Spree (1973) to describe the supposedly comforting ambience shed by the sort of Disaster tale told by UK writers like John Wyndham (see also Holocaust; Post-Holocaust). Though later critical work on Wyndham has emphasized the ambiguities and darknesses of his work, the ...
Feintuch, David
(1944-2006) US lawyer, antique dealer and author who began to publish work of genre interest with the first volume of the Nick Seafort series Midshipman's Hope (1994), which depicts the life and adventures of a young cadet on a spaceship whose rituals are extremely like that of a planet-bound – indeed, more specifically, an early nineteenth-century – navy: specifically the navy in which C S Forester's Horatio Hornblower serves, ...
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 ...