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Thursday 12 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.
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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 ...
Space Truckers
Film (1996). Goldcrest Films International, Peter Newman Productions and InterAL. Produced and directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Gordon and Ted Mann. Cast includes Barbara Crampton, Charles Dance, Stephen Dorff, Olwen Fouéré, Dennis Hopper, Tim Loane, Debi Mazar, Shane Rimmer and George Wendt. 95 minutes. Colour. / Ramshackle mises en scene, some garish over-acting, a careless handling of the underlying dynamic of conflict ...
Jurado, Cristina
(1972- ) Spanish Writer, popularizer, translator, editor and publisher. She has published four sf novels and novellas, two collections, and about forty short stories. She has contributed to important anthologies, such as The Best of Spanish Steampunk (anth 2015, ed James and Marian Womack), Distópicas: antología de escritoras españolas de ciencia ficción ...
Erskine, Douglas
Pseudonym of Scots-descended Canadian lawyer John Stuart Buchan (1852-1927). It has implausibly been suggested that Erskine was a pseudonym of John Buchan – perhaps because his son's full name was John Norman Stuart Buchan (1911-1996). Erskine's novel – A Bit of Atlantis (1900) – lacks any resemblance to Buchan's own work of the time; in this tale, a Scottish Canadian inventor, who descends from lost Atlanteans, is shipwrecked on ...
Brown, James Cooke
(1921-2000) US sociologist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Emissary" in Astounding for July 1952 as by Jim Brown, and in whose sf novel, The Troika Incident: A Tetralogue in Two Parts (1970), astronauts from the USA, France and the USSR are shot forward by a century. There they discover a Utopia – built on lines that combine Edward Bellamy and William ...
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 ...