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Saturday 7 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 2 March 2026
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Grant, Rob
(1955-2026) UK author, initially best known under the collaborative pseudonym Grant Naylor for his work on the Red Dwarf (1988-current) Television series (which see for discussion). Only one related novel, Grant's solo Backwards (1996), has not been published under this name; as the title suggests, the central sf theme in Backwards is that of ...
Green, Joseph
(1931-2026) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" in New Worlds for February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus stories (not all sf) have ...
Simmons, Dan
(1948-2026) US elementary school teacher circa 1971-1987 and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine for April 1982, and who was for some time thought of primarily as an author of tales of Horror, some of which – along with sf and Fantasy stories – were assembled ...
Ashby, Madeline
(1983- ) US-born author, in Canada from early adulthood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "In Which Joe and Laurie Save Rock n' Roll" in Tesseracts Eleven: Amazing Canadian Speculative Fiction (anth 2007) edited by Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips. Her Hard SF Machine Dynasties sequence, beginning with vN (2012), follows the ...
Hawthorne, Julian
(1846-1934) US author, journalist and anthologist, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he wrote a biography, and father of writer Hildegarde Hawthorne (1871-1952). Julian forever lived in the shadow of his father and never mustered even a fraction of Nathaniel's reputation; indeed he sullied the family name when he became inadvertently involved in a speculation fraud in 1908 which made others rich and put him in gaol for a few months in 1913. In a ...
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 ...