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Tuesday 17 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 16 February 2026
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House, Edward Mandell
(1858-1938) US political figure – in his refusal of official duties rather like an earlier Bernard Baruch (1870-1965) – involved with President Woodrow Wilson in setting up the League of Nations; his urgency about the USA's joining the League played some part in his dismissal in 1919 from Wilson's inner circle of advisors. Philip Dru, Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935 (1912), published anonymously, is a surprisingly wide-ranging exercise in ...
Boorman, John
(1933- ) UK film director, famous for movies like Point Blank (1967) and Deliverance (1972), who novelized his own Zardoz (1974) as Zardoz (1974) with Bill Stair (1939-1991). As a director he has also ventured into fantasy with Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and the Arthurian Excalibur (1981). The Tailor of Panama (2001), based on John Le Carré's ...
Fanciful Tales of Time and Space
US Digest-size magazine. One issue, Fall 1936, published by Shepard & Wollheim; edited by Donald A Wollheim. Fanciful Tales of Time and Space contained a mixture of weird, sf and fantasy stories, including work by August Derleth, David H Keller and H P Lovecraft, as well as the first publication of Robert E ...
Maddock, Reginald
(1912-1994) UK author, mostly for Young Adult readers. His first sf novel, The Time Maze (1960), is a literate Time Travel tale whose protagonists, lost in a mysterious cave, find that its innumerable luminescent passages take them to exemplary experiences in three past eras: the time of the Dinosaurs, of Neanderthal man, and in a Neolithic community. Unusually, it is women not men who ...
de Régnier, Henri
(1864-1936) French author, from the mid-1880s a member of the Symbolist Movement, whose members included Gustave Kahn as well as more famous figures like Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), creating in Le Bosquet de Psyché ["Psyche's Arbor"] (1894) a significant presentation of the Symbolist ethos; in this context, he was a poet of importance. His prose works, which somewhat resemble those of his contemporary, Remy ...
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 ...