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Tuesday 18 February 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 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
MacCreagh, Gordon
(circa 1889-1953) Scottish traveller and author, in USA from 1911; he began publishing his tales of adventure in Pulp magazines from about 1913, some of these, like "The Hand of Saint Ury" (January 1951 Weird Tales), having supernatural content; his nonfiction, in particular The Last of Free Africa (1928) [for subtitle see Checklist], was widely read. Of sf interest are two Lost Race ...
Bedford, K A
(1963- ) Australian author whose sf novel, Orbital Burn (2003), complexly depicts an undead female detective (she is kept alive by Nanotechnology after a hacker has infected her biosystems) who is urged by a talking dog on the colony planet Kestrel to trace his master, an Android lad behind whose fabrication by Aliens lie secrets sufficient to save (or destroy) the ...
Sanders, William
(1942-2017) US editor and author, who has also written as by Will Sundown; co-founder with Lawrence Watt-Evans of Helix SF in 2006. The magazine folded in 2008. During his tenure, Sanders became involved in a controversy over intemperate language about Muslims uttered by him in an email he presumed to be a private communication. His first fiction, as by Sundown, was the Pockets of Resistance sequence comprising ...
Skal, David J
(1952-2024) US critic and author who occasionally published as Dave Skal, as in his first work of genre interest, "Chains" in Clarion (anth 1971) edited by Robin Scott Wilson. His first novel, Scavengers (1980), suggests some sf basis for a plot involving Memory transfer in a corrupt world. His second, When We Were Good (1981), evokes a powerful sense of cultural despair in the tale of ...
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 ...