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Sunday 7 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Moon
The lunar voyage has a long literary history, having developed from a standard framework for social Satire to become one of the archetypal projects of speculative fiction. Major works in the former tradition include two second-century tales by Lucian of Samosata, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), the first part of Cyrano de Bergerac's ...
Walderick, Frederick
(? -? ) UK author the protagonist of whose The Prophet (1907) travels to Tibet, where he encounters Theosophists who give him a "moon potion", a Drug which activates previous dormant parts of the human brain. After taking the drug, he gains Psi Powers including Telepathy and the ability to predict events twenty-fours in advance ...
Sinclair, Iain
(1943- ) UK bookseller (retired), poet and author whose fiction is better described as Fantastika than as sf proper, just as the work of his main American mentor, William S Burroughs can be so designated. Studies and mythopoetic explorations of London, comprising a large body of fiction and nonfiction, have provided Sinclair with a central focus from the beginning of his ...
Anonymous SF Authors
This rubric covers the authors of works which, in their first edition, appeared with no indication of authorship whatsoever, and any in which authorship is indicated only by a row of asterisks or some similar symbol; cases where authorship has never been ascertained are discussed in the author entry for Anonymous. Works attributed to "the author of ..." are considered anonymous only if the work referred to is itself anonymous. Cases where subsequent editions reveal ...
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 ...