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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. ...
Perriman, Cole
Joint pseudonym of US authors Wim Coleman (1954- ) and Pat Perrin (? - ), who are married to one another; their very Near Future sf novel, Terminal Games: A Cyberthriller (1994), faces its female protagonist, who does recreational time in a Cyberspace site called Insomnimania, with a serial killer, who seemed restricted to ...
Womack, James
(1979- ) UK editor, translator and poet, married to Marian Womack, notable as a team for The Best of Spanish Steampunk (anth 2015 ebook) with Marian Womack (see Steampunk). His translations include work by Dmitri Bilenkin, Sergio del Molino, Sever Gansovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Silvina ...
Percy, Walker
(1916-1990) US doctor and author, whose first publications, beginning in 1954, were studies in language as a symbolic sign system (a line of thought that led him early into semiotics); his novels – the best known of which remains his first, The Moviegoer (1961) – reflect a searchingly liberal and Catholic reading of American life. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (1971), the first volume of the ...
Burdekin, Katharine
(1896-1963) UK author, who was working in a military hospital during World War One when her husband was wounded in action; she signed some of her work Kay Burdekin in America and, in the 1930s, wrote what remains her best-known novel as by Murray Constantine, a pseudonym which was confirmed only in 1985 by Professor Daphne Patai. Neither of her first two novels explores the fantastic. Her third, The Burning Ring (1927), however, is 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 ...