SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 July 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Quiroule, Pierre
Pseudonym of UK author Walter William Sayer (1892-1982), and also a House Name of the Sexton Blake Library, to which Sayer contributed under that name; it was also used by R Coutts Armour. As Quiroule, Sayer is also credited with The Painted Death (1935), a Lost Race tale featuring Amazons deep in the South American jungle ruled by a queen ...
Kelleam, Joseph E
(1913-1975) US author and civil servant, an occasional contributor to the sf field since publishing his first story, "Rust" (October 1939 Astounding). His first novel, Overlords from Space (1956 dos), is a routine tale in which Alien conquerors of Earth are defeated at last. The Little Men (February 1959 Amazing as "Hunters out of Time"; 1960; vt Hunters out of Time 2012 ...
Wilson, Hazel
(1898-1992) US librarian and author, almost always for younger readers. She is best known for the Herbert sequence about adventures of a young lad whose careless parents allow him to get into pickles, beginning with Herbert (1950). Of some sf interest is Herbert's Space Trip (1955), where Herbert saves an Alien planet from disaster with the help of his Uncle Horace, who is resourceful, like most uncles in twentieth-century children's ...
Huang Chun-Sin
(? - ) Chinese author, possibly pseudonymous, whose only publishing credits are with Hong Kong firms in 1959-1960. Alice in Manialand (1959 chap) makes use of conspicuously coded language [for Aesopian Fantasy and Wonderland see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] to create a Dystopian ...
Carruth, Shane
(1972- ) US filmmaker, with a background in mathematics and software engineering, whose debut feature Primer (2004), a bravura exercise in frugal filmmaking inspired by the $7000 budget claimed for fellow Texan Robert Rodriguez' debut El Mariachi (1992), remains the most complex, oblique, and viewer-challenging Time Travel film yet attempted; that its ...
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 ...