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Friday 20 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Gafla, Ofir Touché
(1968- ) Israeli author whose first novel, Olam Hasof (2004; trans Mitch Ginsburg as The World of the End 2013), begins as an Afterlife fantasy (for Afterlife see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below), with the protagonist's Suicide, which he figures will reunite him with his beloved dead wife. The various worlds into ...
Magazine of Horror, The
US Digest-size magazine, 36 issues August 1963 to April 1971. The longest-running and most successful of the reprint magazines edited by R A W Lowndes for Health Knowledge Inc, this chiefly published classic horror tales, some from the early Pulp magazines, notably Strange Tales and Weird Tales. He also reprinted most of the stories in ...
McGarry, Mark J
(1958- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Acts of Love" (in The Edge of Space, anth 1979, ed Robert Silverberg), whose two novels are Sun Dogs (1981), in which humans and Aliens come to blows over rights over a valuable planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds), and Blank Slate (1984), in ...
Bloom, Rachel
(?1987- ) US comedian, author and performer of the single "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" (2010). This song and its accompanying video (in which the pneumatic Ms Bloom poses in a schoolgirl costume clutching a photograph of Ray Bradbury to her bosom) parlayed its geeky lubriciousness into internet success. Though in essence a novelty song it was well-received by sf fans, becoming only the second musical text to be nominated for a ...
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 ...