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Thursday 19 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Pemberton-Billing, Noel
(1881-1948) UK aviator, inventor, author, publisher and Member of Parliament for Hertford 1916-1921, who saw military service in the second Boer War; in Australia from 1918. His surname has also been given without the hyphen. He is of sf interest for the play High Treason (first performed 1928; ?1929), a Scientific Romance inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and set ...
Farca, Marie C
(1935- ) US author whose first sf novel, Earth (1972), is a competent adventure involving an ecologically-sound culture attempting to cope with a Ruined Earth from within a Keep; confusingly, this planet, which the protagonist Andrew Ames has discovered, is called Earth, just as is Ames's home planet. The sequel, Complex Man (1973), is set on another planet (not called Earth), ...
Feldstein, Al
(1925-2014) US Comics artist, writer and editor who worked for EC Comics from 1948 to 1956, initially as an artist but later in all three capacities. From 1950 to 1953 he edited, often wrote and sometimes drew the EC sf Anthology comic Weird Science (which see), also working on several other EC "New Trend" titles, all cancelled in 1955, and their "New Direction" and ...
Maddox, Tom
Working name of US author and academic Daniel Thomas Maddox (1945-2022), who began publishing polished short stories with "The Mind Like a Strange Balloon" in Omni for June 1985. This introduces characters who reappear in his only novel, Halo (1991), which moves from a Cyberpunk Earth to a Space Habitat, engaging en route in an intense contemplation of the nature of artificial intelligence ...
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 ...