SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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
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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 ...
Hollow Earth Expedition
Role Playing Game (2006). Exile Game Studio. Designed by Jeff Combos, Jason Carl, Jim Cook, Chris Goe, Tyler Running Deer. / Hollow Earth Expedition is a light-hearted homage to Pulp magazine stories describing the perilous exploration of a Hollow Earth, and their predecessors in the work of such authors as Jules Verne. The tone, which is both ...
Grimes
Working name of Canadian singer and musician Claire Elise Boucher (1988- ). Her first album Geidi Primes (2010) is a beautiful, slippery collection of hypnagogic electronic pop songs inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune (fixup 1965) and the film version Dune (1984) directed by David Lynch. Several tracks are named after places ("Caladan") or ...
Freud, Sigmund
(1856-1939) Austrian neurologist, psychoanalyst and author, father figure in the creation of psychoanalysis, the central twentieth-century explanatory discipline of Psychology. He has been inevitably and rightly associated with doctrinal extremities in theory and practice, and his reputation as a scientist of the mind has suffered, perhaps unduly (see Imaginary Science; ...
Mitchell, Professor Willis
(1846-1919) US entrepreneur who described himself on census returns as "inventor" or once as "electrical inventor", holder of many 1890s patents, mostly for improvements on existing inventions. In his modestly fictionalized Utopia, The Inhabitants of Mars [for subtitle see Checklist] (1895), the "Professor" interviews a man who has visited Mars in a hypnotic trance. Mars is run mostly by electricity (see ...
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 ...