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Thursday 16 July 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 14 July 2026
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Crisp, Frank R
(1915-1996) UK author, at one time in the Merchant Navy; his Dirk Rogers sea adventures, which are his best work, sometimes veer close to the fantastic. His sf novels, The Ape of London (1959) and The Night Callers (1960), are routine adventures deploying thriller and horror elements; their sf displacement is inconsiderable. The latter, involving an alien Invasion, was filmed as The ...
Sympson, Revd Joseph
(1715-1807) UK minister – Vicar of Wythburn – and author, a friend of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), whose son, Joseph Sympson (? -? ) was also a poet. The elder Sympson's book-length poem, Science Revived; Or, the Vision of Alfred: A Poem in Eight Books (1802), though essentially a fantasy of history, has some Proto SF interest when the spirit of Alfred the Great is transported to another ...
Chess
Many sf stories make use of this ancient Board Game of stylized War, which emerged in recognizable form in India and China by approximately the sixth century and spread westward, reaching Europe by the eleventh century. Its numerous appearances in Fantasy include Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass (1871), whose introduction of living chess pieces has been ...
Chmielewski, Tom
(1952-2022) US journalist and author, a 1984 Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop graduate. His first novel was Lunar Dust, Martian Sands (2014), a noir sf thriller set in a future of routine interplanetary Space Flight in the early twenty-second century, with human colonies now established on the Moon and Mars (see ...
Carney, Otis
(1922-2006) US author and screenwriter whose Good Friday – 1963: A Journey into the Heart of One Man – and into the Soul of America (1961; vt Good Friday – 196? 1964) fits into a religious frame (see Religion) a musing narrative about an America in danger of losing its heart and its soul. [JC]
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 ...