SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 March 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 16 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Dietz, William C
(1945-2026) US author who began to publish sf with War World (1986; vt Galactic Bounty 1997), the first volume of his Sam McCade sequence of sf adventures about an interstellar bounty hunter, which continued with Imperial Bounty (1988) and two further titles. The galactic venue of the series exhibits some interesting kinks, and McCade himself gradually gains individuality. Although the angle of approach differs – the protagonist this time ...
Muir, Ramsay
(1872-1941) UK historian, Liberal politician and theorist, and author, whose mildly fictionalized quasi-Utopia, Robinson the Great: A Political Fantasia [for full title see Checklist] (1929), edges into the Near Future in its descriptions of an English Parliament free of the shackles of party rule. [JC]
Event Horizon
Film (1997). Paramount Pictures. Directed by Paul W S Anderson. Written by Philip Eisner. Cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Jason Isaacs, Richard T Jones, Sam Neill, Jack Noseworthy, Sean Pertwee, Kathleen Quinlan and Joely Richardson. 96 minutes. Colour. / In the mid-twenty-first century, an experimental spaceship, the Event Horizon, vanishes without trace in the outer solar system. Seven years later the ship is detected when it sends an ...
Roberts, Willo Davis
(1928-2004) US author of books for adults, many of them nonsupernatural horror and gothics, and for children, including one Young Adult tale of sf interest, The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1980), in which a group of mothers, having been given experimental drugs, give birth to Mutant children. The young protagonist must choose whether or not to expose her ESP powers to an unfriendly world. ...
Le Queux, William
(1864-1927) UK journalist and author (his father was French), active contributor to newspapers from the mid-1880s, and author of over 200 books in a variety of genres. Most of his most popular works were espionage thrillers in the vein of E Phillips Oppenheim – a notorious confabulator, Le Queux claimed, unconvincingly, to be a spy himself – and detective novels, often with oriental colouring, beginning with Guilty Bonds (1890), ...
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 ...