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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 ...
Nawaz, Saleema
(1979- ) Canadian author, active from around 2000; her second novel, Songs for the End of the World (2020), whose protagonists – one the author of a novel about a deadly plague – react variously in the very Near Future as a Pandemic begins to spread, soon infecting New York. Much detail is provided. The outcome is uncertain. [JC]
Smith, Cordwainer
The most famous pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-1966), US author, political scientist, academic, military adviser in Korea and Malaya (though not Vietnam). A polyglot, he spent much of his early life before 1931 in Europe, Japan and China, his father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger (1871-1939), being a peripatetic sinologist, author, and propagandist for Sun Yat-sen. His interest in China was profound – he had studied there, and edited his father's ...
Allen, Roger MacBride
(1957- ) US author who began writing with the Torch Space-Opera series, The Torch of Honor (1985) and Rogue Powers (1986) – both assembled as Allies and Aliens (omni, rev 1995) – whose considerable impact may seem excessive to anyone familiar only with the books in synopsis, as neither might have appeared to offer anything new. The Torch of Honor begins with a scene all ...
Lawrence, James Cooper
(1890-1932) US industrialist and author of The Year of Regeneration: An Improbable Fiction (1932), in which a man living in 1983 recounts the technological Inventions and Political innovations – perhaps uncomfortably fascist in their implications for current readers – that brought the world out of depression and into a state approaching Utopia. [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 ...