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Saturday 14 March 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 March 2026
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King, Tappan
(1950- ) US editor and author, grandson of Austin Tappan Wright, and married to editor Beth Meacham from 1978; he began publishing solo work of genre interest with "Fearn" in Galaxy for September 1978, and wrote several stories until 1995. With Meacham he wrote Nightshade Book One: Terror, Inc (1976), which is supernatural horror in the Weird Tales ...
Fisher, Nancy
(? - ) US author of medical thrillers featuring drugs and techniques marginally in advance of what was available at the point of publication; Vital Parts (1993), for instance, concerns an Immortality Drug; Special Treatment (1996) is about a fitness-enhancement regime beyond the current professional sports medicine; Code Red (1998) and Code Blue ...
Chan, Jessamine
(? - ) US editor and author whose first novel, set in a very Near Future Dystopian America, anguishingly traces a mother's potential loss of her child through her effective criminalization in this vision of a land dominated by fundamentalist Religion. Her only recourse seems to be to undergo forced Cultural Engineering ...
Hennessey, John David
(1847-1935) UK-born Australian minister and author, two of whose books are of sf interest: in An Australian Bush Track (1896; vt The Bush Track: A Story of the Australian Bush 1913) an ancient Lost Race of exiles from Asia are discovered in the outback of Australia, where they inhabit a kind of Lemuria called Zoo-Zoo land after a giant snake; The Lost Identity (1897) is fantasy. [JC]
Gilbert, Zoe
(? - ) UK academic and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Time Machine" in Luna Station Quarterly for December 2011. A sophisticated use of interacting modes within the enabling frame of Fantastika consistently marks her longer fiction. In her first novel, Folk (2018), an isolated Island houses a complex community whose interactions, as told through ...
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 ...