SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 February 2026
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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Sinclair, Carl
(? - ) New Zealand-born UK author, for whose sf novel Sixth Cycle (2014) with Darren Wearmouth, see his collaborator. In his second novel, Escalation Force (2015), a deadly Weapon is discovered in an Underground cache dating back to World War Two. [JC]
Tofte, Arthur R
(1902-1980) US author who enjoyed two widely separated careers as a published author, the first beginning with his first story, "The Meteor Monsters" in Amazing for August 1938, when as a member of the Milwaukee Fictioneers – which was focused on the memory and example of Stanley G Weinbaum – he was briefly interested in sf. Between 1938 and his retirement in 1969 he was a business executive. In the 1970s, encouraged ...
Rimel, Duane W
(1915-1996) US poet and author of some short fiction, some of it with H P Lovecraft; his sf novel, Time Swap (1969) as by Rex Weldon, combines Time Travel and Sex. [JC]
Casparian, Gregory
(1856-1942) Turkish-Armenia-born painter, photo-engraver and author, whose distant Near Future sf novel, An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1906), frames its central story with a description of a twentieth-century world dominated by America and the UK; Technology has advanced in various ways; Sex can be determined prenatally; ...
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 ...