SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 13 June 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.
Site updated on 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Gibson, Gary
(1965- ) Scots author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Mother Love" in Skeleton Crew for March 1991, and whose first novel, Angel Stations (2004), neatly follows the pattern of the "new Space Opera", the kind of baroquely expansive tale which exfoliated in the late twentieth century and whose most comprehensive example may be Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos (omni ...
Yugoslavia
This entry, written for the second edition of the encyclopedia, awaits updating and linking to further new entries covering the development of sf in the various post-1992 successor states such as Croatia (see also Slavic Fantastika). / Yugoslavia was established as a nation in 1918, but the first sf works in two of its three linguistic areas – the Serbocroat and the Slovenian – long predated that. The first sf ...
Ross, Olin J
(1858-1941) US author of The Sky Blue: A Tale of the Iron Horse and of the Coming Civilization (1904), in which, by virtue of railroads (see Transportation), a new civilization is created in the Near Future. [JC]
Russell, Eric Frank
(1905-1978) UK author who used the pseudonyms Webster Craig, Duncan H Munro and Niall Wilde (also spelled Naille Wilde) on a few short stories, and borrowed Maurice G Hugi's (see Brad Kent) name for one other, "The Mechanical Mice" (January 1941 Astounding). He began publishing work of genre interest with "The Saga of Pelican West" for Astounding Science-Fiction in 1937, and he was only the second UK writer, after ...
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 ...