SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 March 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 March 2026
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Pathfinders Series
These are four UK tv series that aired in 1960 and 1961, featuring recurring characters who engage in pioneering flights to the Moon, Mars and Venus. / 1. Target: Luna (1960). ABC Weekend Television. (Production credits assumed to be the same as those of the other three series.) Produced by Sydney Newman. Directed by Guy Verney. Written by Malcolm Hulke and ...
Roberts, Terence
Pseudonym of Ivan Terence Sanderson (1911-1973), Scottish-born US author and illustrator on the natural sciences, as in Living Treasure (1941), about wildlife around the Caribbean. As Roberts his sf novel was Report on the Status Quo (1955), a Disaster story set in 1958-1959, after World War Three has catapulted the world into a sudden Climate Change accompanied by ...
Kummer, Frederic Arnold, Jr
(1913-1990) US author, son of Frederic Arnold Kummer, Sr, who sometimes varied his first name, also spelling it Frederick or Fredric; he published at least one story as by Martin Vaeh. Kummer began to publish work of genre interest with "The Medici Cup" in The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories (anth 1934), edited anonymously; as an sf author, his career was short, with a few stories before 1939, at least sixteen that year, eighteen ...
Soane, John
(1753-1837) UK architect and author, active in the first capacity from the early 1770;, now perhaps best known for his forty-five years with the Bank of England, for which he served as architect and builder of its paradigm headquarters (scandalously demolished between 1920 and 1939). Along with earlier paintings by Joseph Gandy (1771-1843), he commissioned "A Bird's-eye View of the Bank of England" (1830), which depicts the bank in ruins at some point in the moderately distant future (see ...
Waugh, Sylvia
(1935-2022), UK teacher, librarian, careers adviser and author whose first book was the children's fantasy The Mennyms (1993), about a miniature Wainscot Society comprising a single family living quasi-secretly in a house in the suburbs of some north-England town or City: the well-delineated family members are not human but magically animated life-size rag dolls, whose quiet existence is here seemingly endangered ...
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 ...