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Tuesday 9 December 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 8 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Wright, Ronald
(1948- ) UK-born historian, travel-writer and author, in Canada from 1970. His sf novel, A Scientific Romance (1997), explicitly acknowledges a close connection to H G Wells, whose first Scientific Romance The Time Machine (1895) (see Time Machine; Time Travel) provides a model for the later book, as do the vivid ...
Papp, Desiderio
(1895-1993) Hungarian historian of science, in Europe until forced to flee by Nazi Germany, and mostly in Argentina from 1942, in Chile from 1961; his first name is given variously as Desiderio or Desiderius though in its original, Hungarian form it was almost certainly Dezső. His nonfiction speculative text, Zukunft und Ende der Welt: Ein Buch über die Geschicke von Menschheit und Erde (1932; trans Henry James Stenning as Creation's Doom 1934), assesses ...
Urbanski, Debbie
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Wonder" in Interzone for September/October 2012. Her first novel, After World (2023), set in a distant-Near-Future Ruined Earth, is narrated by an AI "story worker" who traces the experiences of a Last Man figure, herself set in ...
Green, Evie
Pseudonym of UK author Emily Barr (1971- ) who under her own name has written several travel books, twelve nonfantastic novels, and at least three nonfantastic young adult tales. We Hear Voices (2020) as by Green, set in the Near Future after a coronavirus-like Pandemic (see also Disaster) has savaged the planet, focuses on a young boy under the influence of an ...
Lavers, Norman
(1935- ) US ornithologist, academic and author whose sf novel, The Northwest Passage (1984), engages in an experiment (see Postmodernism) familiar to readers of the modern novel: the book comprises a "text", complete with a scholarly apparatus which is itself, of course, part of the "text". In this case, a far-future editorial apparatus surrounds (see Ruins and Futurity) the ...
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 ...