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Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Yellow Peril
The popular Term, not only within sf circles, for military or economic expansionism by China and other Far Eastern nations (see Invasion; Politics) as seen through the distorting lens of Western Paranoia, and understandable in those terms as central to the language and fears expressed in Imperial Gothic in the years before ...
Smyth, Clifford
(1866-1943) US editor of the New York Times Book Review 1913-1922, and author of The Gilded Man: A Romance of the Andes (1918), a Lost Race tale featuring the discovery of a living Incan civilization deep Underground beneath the South American Andes, boasting the high Technology necessary to maintain life in this redoubt, the Power Source for ...
Wise, Susannah
(? - ) UK actor and author, active in the former capacity from the late 1990s. Her first novel, This Fragile Earth (2021), was inspired, according to Wise, by the death of her father the film director Herbert Wise (1924-2015). In Near Future London living conditions continue to worsen as planetary crises (see Climate Change) proliferate; the ...
Foy, George
(1952- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Hellbike" (in Masters of Hell, anth 1987, ed Janet Morris et al). His earlier novels are not fantastic, but his Shift sequence – comprising The Shift (1996), Contraband (1997), The Memory of Fire (2000) and The Last Harbor (2000) – moves from its ...
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 ...