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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. ...
Egan, Jennifer
(1962- ) US author whose early short fiction – most of it smilingly disjunctive (see Postmodernism and SF) and some of it of direct fantastic interest – was assembled in Emerald City: The Collected Works of Jennifer Egan (coll 1993; exp vt Emerald City 1996). The protagonist of her second novel, Look at Me (2001), a model with an artificial face, transacts a hallucinated ...
Wise, Robert L
(1939- ) US evangelical minister and author of a "Christian horror" novel, Midnight (1993) who collaborated with Paul Meier on the second two volumes of the Millennium sequence [see Checklist below]. His solo sf-like novel, Wired (2004), like Millennium focuses on a Christian version of a post-Disaster world, in this case one that has been savagely depopulated and ...
Sinderby, Donald
Pseudonym of UK author Donald Ryder Stephens (1898-1983), in active service during World War One. The last of his five novels, Mother-in-Law India (1930), is a Near Future tale in which the British Empire threatens to crack apart due to Britain's socialist government's foolish promise to give India her freedom (see Imperialism; Politics), opening the ...
Automata
An automaton is a constructed device with powered working parts, often but not necessarily humanoid, often but not always immobile, never conscious, and generally designed to be seen (unless it is specifically hidden). Because it does not think, it cannot be a slave (see Slavery). As much spectacle as Machine, it has been over the centuries often been presented as a Predictive image of humanity's ...
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 ...