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Wednesday 14 May 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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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Palwick, Susan
(1961- ) US academic, Professor Emerita at the University of Nevada since 2017, and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Woman Who Saved the World" in Asimov's for May 1985, and who has since published short fiction regularly, much of this output being assembled in The Fate of Mice (coll 2007). Her second collection, All Worlds Are Real: Short Fictions (coll 2019), contains work ranging from ...
Petyo, Robert
(? - ) US author of The Institute (1978), an authoritarian Dystopia not perhaps very cogently described. [JC]
Levene, Philip
(1926-1973) UK scriptwriter and credited co-author of City of the Hidden Eyes (1960) with J L Morrissey, based on Levene's eight-part BBC Radio serial from 27 April 1959, in which the surface world is threatened by Monsters who occupy a City far Underground; it is likely that adaptation of script to novel was entirely by Morrissey. ...
Kipling, Rudyard
(1865-1936) UK journalist, poet and author known mainly for such works outside the sf field as Plain Tales from the Hills (coll 1888) – which does contain some supernatural tales – and Kim (1901) [see below]; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. During World War One, a conflict he had named "The Great War" as early as 1899, he wrote a great deal of propaganda, but the loss of his ...
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 ...