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Friday 11 July 2025
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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Sutton, Felix
(? - ) US author whose The City under the Sea: an Ace Cooper Adventure (1961), which may be the first volume of an aborted Young Adult series, mildly depicts a Near Future expedition Under the Sea. Ace Cooper is the hero. [JC]
Potter, David
(1874-1962) US naval officer and author who published nonfiction and sentimental novels under his own name and, pseudonymously, a Lost Race novel, The Lost Goddess (1908) as by Edward Barron, in which a beautiful descendant of the Mayans proves to come from a mysterious Island up a great South American river, where some of her folk have survived. [JC]
Children in SF
In his essay "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" (in Science Fiction at Large ed Peter Nicholls anth 1976; vt Explorations of the Marvellous 1978) Thomas M Disch asserts, tongue only partly in cheek, that sf is a branch of children's literature – because most lovers of the genre begin reading it in their early teens, and because many sf stories are about children. Whether or not ...
Collings, Michael R
(1947- ) US poet, story writer and author of a number of nonfiction studies of sf and fantasy writers, including several on various aspects of the work of Stephen King and Bibliographies of King, Orson Scott Card and Peter Straub. In Naked to the Sun: Dark Visions of Apocalypse (coll 1986 chap) and ...
Ferrar, William M
(1823-1906) Irish-born author, in Australia from around 1842, who also wrote as by Ferdinand Ferntree. No copies of his first identified title of sf interest, The Dream of Hubertus (circa 1870-1879), seem to have been examined. Given the carry-over of the eponym, this tale may have been an early draft of Ferrar's ambitious Dystopia, ...
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 ...