SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 19 April 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 14 April 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Cooper, Merian C
(1893-1973) US screenwriter, film director and producer best known for directing and producing (with Ernest B Schoedsack) the original King Kong (1933), based on a story by himself and Edgar Wallace. Both Cooper and Wallace are given title credit in the resulting novel Tie: King Kong: Conceived by Edgar Wallace and Merian C Cooper: Novelization by Delos W Lovelace (1932) by Delos W ...
Whittaker, Frederick
(1838-1889) UK-born author, in USA from 1850; perhaps best known for The Complete Biography of George Armstrong Custer (1876 2vols), which was adulatory. Of his Dime-Novel SF, The Grizzly-Hunters; Or, the Navahoe Captives: A Tale of the Lost City of the Sierras (1871) is a Lost Race tale set in a secret City, which turns out to be inhabited by Aztecs; the two white ...
Stine, Jean Marie
Working name of the US author, born Henry Eugene Stine (1945- ), whose name was legally changed to Jean Marie Stine and who has published under the surname Stine throughout. Season of the Witch (1968) as Hank Stine interestingly blends sf and erotica in the story of a man biologically transformed into a woman as a punishment for rape and murder, but who eventually finds her/his true role and contentment as a transsexual (see ...
McMullan, Thomas
(? - ) Scottish teacher, journalist and author resident in England. The protagonist of his first novel, The Last Good Man (2020), which is set in the Near Future after a pervasive Pandemic-like planetary Disaster, escapes a disintegrating City to visit the remote village where his cousin lives. Impossibly placid and twee, ...
Cardona Peña, Alfredo
(1917-1995) Costa Rican poet, essayist, journalist, academic and author who lived in Mexico from 1938, but who preserved ties with his native country throughout his life. Together with the Chilean Hugo Correa, he could be considered the Latin American version of Ray Bradbury. He began to study arts in San José, Costa Rica, and finished in El Salvador, where he also started working as a ...
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 ...