SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 17 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Jennings, Hargrave
(?1817-1890) UK author, who may have also written as by Sha Rocco, though it is much more likely that books under that name were by Abisha S Hudson (1819-1904). Jennings published some studies in the occult, most famously The Rosicrucians, their rites and mysteries; with chapters on the ancient fire- and serpent-worshippers (1870; several revised editions), and several miscellanies, these assembling essays in cultural criticism along with tales meant usually to illustrate his ...
Peattie, Elia Wilkinson
(1862-1935) US journalist and author, influential and extremely prolific in both capacities; in her column (1890-1896) for the Omaha World-Herald, she took controversial positions, including a condemnation of the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee on 29 December 1890. Her supernatural fiction, which includes the book-length "The Fountain of Youth: A Romance of the Supernatural" (28 October 1894-13 January 1895 Omaha World-Herald) and the tales assembled as ...
Bioy Casares, Adolfo
(1914-1999) Argentine author, married 1940-1993 to the author and anthologist Silvina Ocampo; he was noted from his first book, Prólogo ["Prologue"] (coll 1929), for the surreal displacements of his work, which uses sf or detective forms in an abstract, parodic fashion (see Parody), and is generally metaphysical in intent. La invención de Morel (1940; trans Ruth ...
Chetwynd-Hayes, R
(1919-2001) Working name of UK author and anthologist Ronald Henry Glynn Chetwynd-Hayes, who also published stories as by Angus Campbell and Henry Glynn; though he wrote some sf, most of his more than 200 tales, beginning with "The Orator" for The Lady in 1953, are fantasy or horror. The Clavering Grange tales, a series which includes two novels and variously released shorter works, are set in a twelfth-century mansion in Kent, where hauntings are numerous; some of the tales are ...
Gibbons, Stella
(1902-1989) UK journalist, poet and author, active from the early 1920s. Perhaps unfairly, she remains known almost exclusively for her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), set in a moderately explicit Near Future, sometime after the 1946 Anglo-Nicaraguan War, when public videophones and private airplanes are common. The story itself, a savagely comic Parody of epiphany-choked rural novels as written by D H Lawrence ...
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 ...