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Sunday 14 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.
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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 ...
Valdes, Valerie
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Shub-Niggurath's Witnesses" in She Walks in Shadows (anth 2015) edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R Stiles (see Cthulhu Mythos). She is more direct sf interest for the Eva Innocente sequence of Space Operas beginning with Chilling Effect ...
Mallett, Daryl F
(1969- ) US bibliographer whose work, beginning in the early 1990s and often in collaboration with Robert Reginald, has been of growing significance for sf scholarship. Publications include the much-expanded second and third editions of Reginald's Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and their Winners (1981; exp 1991; exp 1993) with Reginald, for which Mallett performed the ...
Rosendorfer, Herbert
(1934-2012) Italian-born lawyer, judge, painter, composer, playwright, screenwriter and author, in Germany between 1943 and 1997; he served as a judge in Munich 1967-1993, and in other judicial positions. His early novel, Der Ruinenbaumeister (1969; trans Mike Mitchell as The Architect of Ruins 1992), complexly and ambivalently inserts its narrator into an Underground world, shaped like a vast cigar as though it were a gigantified ...
Mercury
Mercury is the planet nearest the Sun, and hence is difficult to observe. Until the late nineteenth century it was believed to rotate on its axis every 24 hours or so, but this opinion was displaced by that of Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) and Percival Lowell, who contended that it kept the same face permanently towards the Sun. Twentieth-century sf writers thus pictured it as having an extremely hot "dayside", a cold "nightside" ...
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 ...