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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. ...
Wibberley, Leonard
(1915-1983) Irish journalist and author, in the UK from about 1930, in the US from 1943, who published over 100 books, some of his detective fiction being as by Leonard Holton; much of his work was for children, many of these titles being as by Patrick O'Connor or Christopher Webb. Only a modest proportion of his output was sf or fantasy. His first and most famous sf novel, the ostensibly adult tale which begins the Grand Fenwick Ruritanian spoof sequence, ...
Yerex, Cuthbert
Pseudonym of Canadian-born author Mary Estella Yerex (1867-1947), in the US from an undetermined point after 1883, when she married Arthur Cuthbert in Ontario; her Christopher Brand: Looking Forward (1934) is a relatively late response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), in which the abolition of money, and other radical solutions, ends the Great Depression. [JC]
Nagayama Yasuo
(1962- ) Japanese dentist and historian, author of several dozen works on varied non-genre or Equipoisal subjects, including true crime, youth culture and modern parenting. Nagayama rose to prominence in the field of sf criticism in the early twenty-first century, as editor of several compilations of early Japanese genre work (including a collection of Jūza Unno's stories), ...
Sussmann, Susana
(1972- ) Venezuelan physicist, metrologist, quality auditor, editor and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories, her first genre publication being "La esperanza es lo último que se pierde" ["Hope is the Last Thing to Go"] (in Visiones 2000, anth 2000). She is best known as editor of the international Webzine Crónicas de la Forja (launched in 2006), webmaster of ...
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 ...