SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Madsen, David
(1929- ) US author whose nonfantastic (but exorbitant) Black Plume: The Suppressed Memoirs of Edgar Allan Poe (1980) offers inter alia some illuminating analysis of the laboriously tortured psyche of a central early figure in the creation of American sf (see Edgar Allan Poe). Of direct sf interest is U.S.S.A. (1989), a noir tale featuring an ex-CIA agent investigating an explosive murder in ...
Williams, David J
(1971- ) UK author whose Cyberpunk-flavoured Autumn Rain Trilogy – comprising The Mirrored Heavens (2008), The Burning Skies (2009) and The Machinery of Light (2010) – begins with the Near Future destruction of a Space Elevator and the assignment to protect America undertaken by two counterintelligence agents, who ...
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Videogame (1995). The Dreamers' Guild. Designed by Harlan Ellison, David Mullich, David Sears. Platforms: DOS. / I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream is a graphical Adventure based on Harlan Ellison's Hugo award-winning short story of the same name. The game, scripted and codesigned by ...
Kahaney, Amelia
(? - ) US author whose Young Adult Near Future Brokenhearted sequence beginning with The Brokenhearted (2013), and set in a Dystopian version of New York here called Bedlam, puts more emphasis on the romantic element than perhaps normal in this kind of fiction. The mandatory love triangle soon turns violent: 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 ...