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Sunday 12 April 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 6 April 2026
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Stout, Rex
(1886-1975) US author who began publishing poems and stories in magazines as early as 1910, and became best known for his Nero Wolfe detective stories, beginning with Fer-de-Lance (1934) and continuing to the end of his life, the last being A Family Affair (1975); none of the Wolfe novels and novellas have any fantastic content. Some of his early work does, however, contain fantastic elements: the book-length "A Prize for Princes" (2 May 1914 ...
Carrasco, Jesús
Working name of Spanish author Jesús Carrasco Jaramillo (1972- ) in whose first novel, Intemperie (2013; trans Margaret Jull Costa as Out in the Open 2015), a young man engages in a trek across a savagely overheated desert landscape reminiscent of central Spain though hotter (see Climate Change), encountering savants and supernaturally intense Villains in his search for ...
Running Man, The
Film (1987). Taft Entertainment/Keith Barish Productions. Directed by Paul Michael Glaser. Written by Steven E De Souza, based on The Running Man (1982) by Richard Bachman (Stephen King). Cast includes Maria Conchita Alonso, Richard Dawson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. 101 minutes. Colour. / In a near-future, semi-totalitarian, economically crippled USA, a framed cop (Schwarzenegger) is forced to star in the top-rating television game show ...
King, Louis Magrath
(1886-1949) China-born UK diplomat, whose work in the British Consular Office took him to the China-Tibet borderlands, and author whose By Tophet Flare: A Tale of Adventure on the Chinese Frontier of Tibet (1937; vt The Warden of the Marches: A Tale of the Chinese Frontier of Tibet 1938), reflecting his travels, describes the discovery of a Lost Race is deep within the Inner Asian Frontier of China. [JC]
Hood, Christopher M
(? - ) US teacher and author whose first novel, The Revivalists (2022), set in a Near Future world whose populations have barely survived a flu-like Pandemic escaped from melting permafrost (see Climate Change). Chastened small-scale relics, perhaps ultimately viable, of the old world do persist; but the protagonists, parents of a daughter who ...
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 ...