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Sunday 22 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. ...
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey
(1836-1907) US author best-known for Story of a Bad Boy (1879); he was also responsible for Pansy's Wish: A Christmas Fantasy, with a Moral (1869), which was fantasy. Out of His Head, a Romance (coll of linked stories 1862) and The Queen of Sheba (1877) are early examples of the marginal subgenre of sf in which contemporary explorations in Psychology suggest storylines ranging from ...
Koester, Frank
(1876-1927) German-born engineer and author whose birth name was Franz Koester; in the US from 1902 and naturalized in 1904. His Under the Desert Stars (1923) is a Lost Race tale set in the Sahara Desert. [JC]
Wise, David
(1930-2018) US author and journalist, with the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1950s and 1960s, whose works include both fiction and nonfiction about espionage and US politics. Of sf interest is The Samarkand Dimension (1987), a spy thriller in which Soviet sabotage of a US ICBM launch test has disastrous results and is ascribed to Psi Powers, the enemy having overridden the course controls via Telekinesis. The ...
Lawson, Mark
(1962- ) UK broadcaster, journalist and author, active in UK literary circles from 1984, whose Alternate History tale, Idlewild, or Everything Is Subject to Change (1995), focuses on the Icon figures John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, both alive in 1993 and attempting a reunion as assassins hover. [JC]
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 ...