SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 17 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 16 July 2025
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Williams, Tess
(1954-2025) UK-born teacher, editor and author, in Australia for many years, there receiving a degree in literature from Curtin University and an MA in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Padwan Affair" in She's Fantastical (anth 1995) edited by Judith Raphael Buckrich and Lucy Sussex. Of sf interest are two novels: Map of Power (1996), set mostly in a ...
Lynch, Bohun
(1884-1928) UK amateur boxer, caricaturist and author whose early nonfantastic novel, The Tender Conscience (1919), recounts the traumatic experiences of a young man returned from active service in World War One. His one novel of sf interest is Menace from the Moon (1925), a Scientific Romance which rather casually blends Alien Invasion ...
Lerman, Eleanor
(1952- ) US author and award-winning poet who has published several books of verse since 1973. Despite its title, her first novel Janet Planet (2011) is not sf. Lerman's second novel is the sf Radiomen (2015), in which Earth-based shortwave radios are found to form part of an Alien-run network that broadcasts prayers across the universe. The middle-aged female protagonist – who as a child once saw one such alien ...
Mead, Shepherd
Working name of US author Edward Mead (1914-1994), in either Switzerland or the UK after 1957; he worked in advertising before turning to writing, and was active in various genres. Satire and comedy combine in most of his works, most pointedly in his best-known work, the nonfantastic mock instructional manual, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1952), for the staged version of which he shared a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony. Satire also ...
Futrelle, Jacques
(1875-1912) US author and theatrical manager, on the editorial staff of the Boston American; he was one of four authors of sf (the others are John Jacob Astor, F D Millet and W T Stead) known to have gone down with the Titanic. The stories assembled in his Thinking Machine collections about the scientific detective Professor Augustus S F X Van Dusen ...
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 ...