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Sunday 14 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Heming, Jack
(1899-1987) UK author of a Lost Race tale, The Lost World of the Colorado (1940), whose young protagonists discover, on a high plateau, Monsters who display a weird caprice of Evolution: each of them combining the features of two real species. [JC]
In Like Flint
Film (1967). Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Gordon Douglas. Written by Hal Fimberg. Cast includes Totty Ames, Lee J Cobb, James Coburn, Andrew Duggan, Herb Edelman, Jean Hale, Steve Ihnat, Hanna Landy and Anna Lee. 114 minutes. Colour. / This sequel to Our Man Flint (1966) takes its farcical secret agent further into sf territory, including a concluding Space Flight. A secret organization of beautiful women, using the Fabulous Face ...
Tayler, J Lionel
(1874-1930) UK medical doctor, teacher, minister and author whose remarkable Scientific Romance, The Last of My Race: A Dream of the Future (1924), has perhaps suffered through its being structured as a dream. Ignoring (as proper) its debilitating, tagged-on conclusion, Tayler's Future History reads as a worthy precursor of the cosmic histories soon to be composed by Olaf ...
Reverie, Reginald
Pseudonym of US author Grenville Mellen (1799-1841), whose extremely early volume of short stories, Sad Tales and Glad Tales (coll 1828), has been claimed as a shaping influence upon Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Of sf interest in the collection is a Satire, "The Meeting of the Planets", in which the planets talk among themselves about Homo sapiens; and "The ...
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 ...