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Wednesday 9 July 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 7 July 2025
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Hagio Moto
(1949- ) Japanese artist, often described as the "founding mother" of modern Japanese comics for girls, regarded, along with Keiko Takemiya, as the epicentre of the Year 24 Group of influential female Manga creators (see Women SF Writers). Much of the style of Hagio's early output was born from her attempts to ...
Butler, Andrew M
(? - ) UK academic and critic whose PhD from the University of Hull was published as Ontology and Ethics in the Writings of Philip K. Dick (1995); he returned to Philip K Dick with The Pocket Essential Philip K. Dick (2000), the first of several books he wrote in the Pocket Essentials series of short introductions. / Though his academic interests include various aspects of critical ...
Gravity
The force of gravity is the most inescapable and unvarying fact of terrestrial life, and when writers first sent characters into Spaceships and on to other planets the phenomenon of low gravity, or of no gravity at all, figured prominently among the wonders of space. Many early authors did not realize that complete weightlessness is a consequence of free fall, but this soon became a fact to be taken for granted in describing ...
McConkey, James
(1921-2019) US academic and author of a desultory Postmodern Dystopia, Kayo: The Authentic and Annotated Autobiographical Novel from Outer Space (1987), a story within a story within a story told ultimately by a narrator whose name – Ohcnas, Sancho [Panza] spelled backwards – and whose crime – he kills the Nod – confesses McConkey's Satirical, deflating ...
Cox, A B
(1893-1971) UK author, in active service during World War One; best known for detective stories as by Anthony Berkeley and as by Francis Iles. He also wrote some fantasies and at least two sf works: The Professor on Paws (1926), in which a man's brain is transplanted into the family Cat (see Identity Transfer), but – in an odd prefiguration of Daniel ...
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 ...