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Sunday 14 June 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.
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
O'Neill, Gerard K
(1927-1992) US physicist, at Princeton University from 1954 until his death, whose popular-science book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977) argues strongly for the construction of Space Habitats, either in Earth orbit or at one of the stable Lagrange Points of our Earth/Moon system – especially L5. His arguments aroused great interest among would-be space colonists, and were influential in ...
Phantom Lady
US Comic (1947-1949; 1954-1955). Fox Publications 1947-1949: eleven issues, numbered #13-#23. Farrell Publications 1954-1955: four issues, the first numbered #5, then #2-#4. Ruth Roche scripted most – probably all – the Phantom Lady strips; Baker drew most of them during the Fox era, though Jack Kamen did a few; Farrell-era artists are unidentified. 36 pages, with 3-4 long strips (2-3 starring Phantom Lady) and ...
Daniel, Charles S
(1851-? ) US author whose sf novel, Ai: A Social Vision (1892), which is set in 1950, describes some futile attempts to construct a Utopia; the protagonist, perhaps in despair, makes it clear that only a heavy dose of Eugenics can clear a path for the new world. [JC]
Hervey, Maurice H
(circa 1854-? ) UK journalist and author active at the end of the nineteenth century. The protagonist of his sf novel, David Dimsdale, M.D.: A Story of Past and Future (1897), awakens in 1920 (see Sleeper Awakes) to find ubiquitous electrical advances plus the daughter of the woman he'd loved in 1895. He ends up marrying the daughter. [JC]
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...