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Wednesday 18 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 18 February 2026
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Scott, Harper
(? - ) US author whose sf novel, How I Helped the Chicago Cubs (Finally!) Win the World Series (2005), is a Baseball tale in which two frustrated Chicago Cubs fans in 2160 use a Time Machine to abduct two real players (Joe Tinker and Orval Overall) from the team that helped the Cubs win their only World Series in 1908, hoping their insertion into the twenty-second century team ...
Gold, Joe
(1960- ) US author of The Lamp Post Motel (2006), a Time Travel novel in which Anthropologists from the future punitively transfer the mind of a motel owner into the bodies of those he himself is accustomed – as though he were an anthropologist himself – to observe. [JC]
Roche, Eugenius
(1780/1786-1829) Either a French-born author in the UK from his late teens, or (slightly less likely) an Irish-born writer raised in France and in the UK from his early twenties; in any case, his career in London as journalist and playwright was financially disastrous, litigious, and he left many children in extreme poverty after his early death. The long title poem of his posthumous London in a Thousand Years (coll 1830), is a contemplation, in the mode of the ...
Barber, Ros
(1964- ) US-born academic, poet and author, in UK from the age of eighteen, her first book, How Things Are On Thursday (coll 2004 chap) being poetry. Her first novel, The Marlowe Papers (2012) could – given William Shakespeare's central importance to English literature – might almost be read as an Alternate History given a plot in which Christopher ...
Superman [character]
1. US Comic strip created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, loosely inspired by Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930), which Siegel had reviewed in his Fanzine, Science Fiction (which see), in 1932. Siegel was an sf fan, creator of several early ...
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 ...