SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 6 December 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.
Site updated on 1 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Wooldridge, C W
(1847-1908) UK physician and author, in USA from childhood. In his Near Future Utopia, Perfecting the Earth: A Piece of Possible History (1902), a charismatic figure resembling Theodore Roosevelt begins to transform America by setting the army – idle in 1913 because there are no wars about to happen – to the task of building the West on utopian lines. Their climactic achievement is a utopian ...
Matter Penetration
The ability to walk through walls or be otherwise transported through solid matter is a wish-fulfilment fantasy less prevalent than Invisibility, perhaps owing to its greater scientific implausibility. The first sf example is perhaps "The Ray of Displacement" (October 1903 The Metropolitan Magazine) by Harriet Prescott Spofford, whose titular Ray diffuses an individual's atoms and ...
Enright, D J
(1920-2002) UK poet, academic, critic and author; he was given an OBE in 1991. Most of his work has no fantastic content, though Heaven Knows Where (1957) Satirizes with a fairly soft brush the attempts of some British academics to construct a Utopia in an Island venue. Of more direct interest is the Atlantis series of Young Adult novels – ...
Moffatt, James
(1922-1993) Canadian-born UK author who wrote at least 290 novels in several genres under at least forty-five pseudonyms, including the Hank Janson House Name (though no Janson sf titles) and Richard Allen, a personal pseudonym for the non-sf Skin books. In the 1960s he wrote the first chapter of a novel which, when taken over by Michael Moorcock according to a practice very common in ...
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 ...