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Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Edgar, Peter
Pseudonym of Peter Edgar King-Scott (1918-1993), UK engineer, lecturer, management consultant and author of nonfiction works on industrial management [not listed below]. His birth name lacked the hyphen, which he legally added in 1943. Edgar's Near Future sf novel is Cities of the Dead (1963), in which radiation from nuclear testing in the Pacific has caused various creatures Under the Sea to attain unnaturally huge ...
Oates, Joyce Carol
(1938- ) US author who has also written as by Fernandes, Lauren Kelly and Rosamond Smith. Her immensely prolific career – around eighty novels; close to 1000 short stories, many of them long and ambitious, mostly assembled in forty or more collections (about fifty remain uncollected); plus fifty plays, twelve volumes of poetry, and much other work – has in itself been a barrier to her proper appreciation. In recent years, however, despite its almost ...
Chalmers, Garet
Pseudonym of UK author Margaret Simpson Chalmers (1939- ), whose two sf novels for Robert Hale Limited are A Legend in His Own Deathtime (1978), set in a Far-Future City deeply sunk in Decadence, and Homo-Hetero (1980), portraying the dilemma of two lovers of opposite gender in a ...
Stine, G Harry
(1928-1997) US author who published most of his early work, most of it Children's SF, as by Lee Correy, but who in the 1980s began increasingly to publish fiction under his own name; his popularizing nonfiction about space travel and satellites had always been released under his own name, however, as was his first story, "Galactic Gadgeteers" in Astounding for May 1951. As Correy, his best-known sf tale is "'... And a Star to Steer Her ...
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 ...