SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 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
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Doctor Who
UK tv series (1963-current). BBC TV. Created by Sydney Newman, Donald Wilson. First-season producer Verity Lambert, story editor David Whitaker; the Doctor played by William Hartnell, November 1963-October 1966; see below for his many successors. Theme music by Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. 26 seasons ...
Hertzka, Theodor
(1845-1924) Austrian economist and author of the influential socialist Utopia, Freiland: Ein Sociales Zukunftsbild (1890; trans Arthur Ransom – clearly not the writer and translator Arthur Ransome – as Freeland: A Social Anticipation 1891) and its sequel, Eine Reise nach Freiland (1893; trans anon as ...
Vess, Charles
(1951- ) American artist. After receiving a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1973, Vess briefly worked in animation before moving to New York City in 1977 to do illustrations for National Lampoon, Heavy Metal, Klutz Press, and other clients. Yet he displayed a natural talent for illustrating works of Fantasy by producing a number of paintings for a 1977 edition of J R R ...
Scully, Frank
(1892-1964) US author and humorist, variously prolific, who is best known for his influential UFO book, Behind the Flying Saucers (1950) – which many readers have assumed is fiction, or at least fictionalized. This was expanded from two instalments of his regular column for the Slick magazine Variety: "One Flying Saucer Lands In New Mexico" (12 October 1949 Variety) and "Flying Saucers Dismantled, Secrets May ...
Burton, Lloyd
(?1935- ) South African author, who lived and worked in colonial Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s, various countries in the Middle East afterwards and since 1972 in Rhodesia; now back in South Africa. He started writing during his assignment in Kenya, but his first book, novel The Yellow Mountain (1978) was published while in Rhodesia. A typical propagandist adventure fiction in favour of the white settlers' cause in Rhodesia, it is set in Kenya, Northern Africa ...
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 ...