SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 29 September 2023
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 25 September 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Hanifin, John M
(? -? ) US author, whose reported death circa 1898 seems unlikely as manuscripts in his name were being submitted for publication five years later; his Lost Race novel, The Blind Men and the Devil (1891) as by Phineas, describes the experiences of a married couple who, mistaken for dead, are dumped into a river and discover an Underground world inhabited by a blind race. ...
Santos, Domingo
Pseudonym of Spanish author, editor, translator, anthologist and columnist Pedro Domingo Mutiñó (1941-2018), the major contemporary Spanish sf writer, considered as the father of sf in his country. Throughout a lifetime devoted to sf he published about forty novels (several in collaboration), a dozen collections, a hundred stories, fifty Anthologies, almost a thousand translated works, and hundreds of articles, ...
Wright, Stephen
(1946- ) US author whose only novel of sf interest, M31: A Family Romance (1988), is a Fabulation in an agglutinative style reminiscent of that used by William Gaddis (1922-1998) in The Recognitions (1955). Abandoned by their parents – Dot and Dash, who claim to be Aliens descended from the inhabitants of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31 in the Messier catalogue) – the protagonists ...
Garfield, Richard
(1963- ) US Game designer with a PhD in combinatorial mathematics, inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in 1998. Garfield is perhaps the epitome of game designer as celebrity mathematician. He is famous primarily for having invented the modern Collectible Card Game in 1993 with the release of his first published game, Magic: The Gathering (see ...
Gustafson, Jon
(1945-2002) US art and artbook appraiser, expert in sf art, active sf fan (see Fandom) and author, married to V E Mitchell. He began publishing professional fiction of genre interest with "Beast" in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume II (anth 1986) edited by Algis Budrys, though he had earlier begun and continued for many years the "Gimlet Eye" column (1975-1993) about ...
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 ...