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Saturday 8 August 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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de Vere, Howard
Pseudonym of US author William Howard Van Orden (?1816-?1894), active in the later nineteenth century as an author of tales for Boys' Papers. Three titles have been discovered to be of sf interest: The Demon of the Deep; Or, Above and Beneath the Waves (1876 The Boys of New York; 1893 chap), an Under the Sea adventure for boys with Inventions galore, including a submarine ...
Holy War
Board and counter Wargame (1979). Metagaming Concepts. Designed by Lynn Willis. / Holy War's framing narrative describes the creation of a Pocket Universe in which time passes at a greatly accelerated rate by a vast alien entity. After the construction is complete, this being realizes that life has appeared on one of the planets orbiting the handful of stars in its microverse. While the entity is considering the ...
Kropp, Lloyd
(1937- ) US composer and author none of whose novels can be read primarily as sf, though each touches, at times with some Equipoisal drive, on sf: The Drift (1969) is a kind of Lost World tale set in the heart of the Sargasso Sea, where an enclosed culture has evolved in ignorance of the outside world; Who Is Mary Stark? (1974) examines the lives of ...
MacGregor, Reginald James
(1887-1961) UK playwright and author of The Monkey-God's Secret (1924), whose sf content is undetermined; in later years, MacGregor, writing as R J McGregor (note spelling of surname), later published Knights of the Skies (1947), a Children's SF tale whose protagonists are rescued by an advanced Technology: a plane that is also being used to destroy warmongers worldwide. Under the same name, he released ...
Mitchell, V E
Working name of US author Victoria Estelle Mitchell Gustafson (1954-2017), married to Jon Gustafson, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Captain" in The Moscow Moffia Presents Rat Tales (anth 1987) edited by Jon Gustafson (her husband) and Dean Wesley Smith under the joint pseudonym Smith Gustafson. Mitchell wrote four novel Ties ...
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 ...