SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 15 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Maxwell, Everina
(? - ) UK author whose first novel, The Course of Honor (2017 ebook; rev vt Winter's Orbit 2021), is a Space Opera where individual planets are bunched into local empires which have themselves been coordinated into a defensive network known as the Resolution. At the verge of a renewal of this network, marital upsets, and some gender insecurities (see Sex), threaten the ...
Cole, Allan
(1943-2019) US Television scriptwriter – with more than 100 credits to his name – journalist and author; his sf screenwriting includes three episodes of the series The Incredible Hulk (1977-1982), two of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981) and six of Defenders of the Earth ...
Future Fiction
US magazine. 17 issues November 1939 to July 1943, 48 further issues May/June 1950 to April 1960. Published by Blue Ribbon Magazines, later Double Action Magazines and (from April 1941) Columbia Publications; edited by Charles D Hornig (November 1939-November 1940) and Robert A W Lowndes (April 1941-April 1960). Future Fiction began as a companion magazine to Science Fiction (see ...
One of the Unemployed
Pseudonym of UK soldier and author Horace Edwin Cole Littlejohns (1880-1946), in active service in both the Boer War and World War One; the name was used solely for his fast-moving sf thriller The Brain-Box (1927). This centres on a German-created thought-reading Invention (see Psionics) with which it is intended to extract military secrets directly from the minds of Allied generals; the ...
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 ...