SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 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 ...
Amazing Stories
"The magazine of scientifiction", with whose founding Hugo Gernsback announced the existence of sf as a distinct literary species. It was initially a letter-sized SF Magazine issued monthly by Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company as a companion to Science and Invention and Radio News, first issue dated April 1926, and was the first magazine to publish science fiction ...
Schulman, J Neil
(1953-2019) US author whose books were very influential in the Libertarian-SF movement. Alongside Night (1979), which is set in a ruinously Decadent New York, describes the salvation of a future America – whose economy has been destroyed by government intervention in the free market: a singularly bad guess in post-2008 hindsight – by a hard-cash underground economy evolved ...
Bamber, George
(1932-2017) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ottmar Balleau X 2" for Rogue in 1961. His sf novel, The Sea Is Boiling Hot (1971), deals with a large number of themes, including Ecology: nuclear pollution has set the seas to boiling; mankind lives in huge domed Cities and communicate via Matter Transmission; Computers do the ...
Kang Youwei
(1858-1927) Chinese author, poet and would-be reformer, influential on Utopian writings of the early twentieth century, although his own work on the subject was published only posthumously. Well-read in international history, Kang published accounts of the political reforms of Russia's Peter the Great and Japan's Meiji Emperor, regarding them both as fine examples for China to imitate. As a young man, he directly petitioned the Guangxu ...
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 ...