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Friday 13 February 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 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Crawford, Chris
(1950- ) US Game designer, important in the early years of commercial Videogame development and subsequently noted for his distaste for the direction taken by the industry. Crawford was an enthusiastic player of board and counter Wargames who went on to design many of the seminal Computer Wargames, including Tanktics (1976) – his ...
Pan Huiting
(? - ) Singapore artist and author, active in the first capacity from around 2005. In her sf novel, Red Dust, White Snow (2023), which initially seems to channel American Genre SF Satires from the 1960s, an unnamed office worker is given a device or engine which, when turned on, takes her into a Parallel World. As the dream-like world she encounters ...
Loudon, Jane Webb
(1800-1858) UK author of books on popular natural history and gardening, and of The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827 3vols; rev 1828), published anonymously, like Mary Shelley, and also when she was relatively young, though not in her teens. Her birth year is almost certainly 1800 (as given here from 2022) not 1807, the earlier date having been established through research by Nickianne Moody, Andy ...
Bond, Nancy
(1945- ) US author best-known for her Young Adult fantasy, A String in the Harp (1976). Of her other works, The Voyage Begun (1981) is sf, in which a quixotic scheme to build a boat in a world ravaged by Pollution and punishing scarcity becomes a moving study of an attempt to come to terms with the real world; and in Another Shore (1988) a young woman finds herself 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 ...