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Sunday 7 June 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.
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Dark Earth
Videogame (1997). Kalisto Entertainment. Designed by Guillaume Le Pennec, Sylvain Dousset, Frédéric Menne. Platforms: Win. / Dark Earth, an early example of the action Adventure form, is set on a sunless world, a future Earth shrouded in dust clouds thrown up by a catastrophic series of meteor impacts (see Ruined Earth). A few cities remain, huddled around mysterious ...
Anthony, Piers
Working name of US author Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob (1934- ) for all his published work. Born in England, he was educated in the USA and took out US citizenship in 1958, beginning to publish short stories with "Possible to Rue" in Fantastic for April 1963, and for the next decade appearing fairly frequently in the magazines, though he has more and more concentrated on longer forms; early work is fairly represented in Anthonology ...
Gordon, Joan
(1947- ) US editor and academic, currently a professor of English at Nassau Community College in New York, whose writing career began with Joe Haldeman (1980 chap), a serviceable introductory study of the work of Joe Haldeman. Her next book, Gene Wolfe (1986), comprises an early attempt to present the work – up to and including The Book of the New Sun – of perhaps the most difficult of all sf ...
Johnson, L P V
(1905-1983) Canadian agricultural scientist and author whose In the Time of the Thetans (1961) features an unpleasant set of Aliens known as Thetans, who resemble starfish. [JC]
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 ...