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Tuesday 15 July 2025
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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Kim, Un-Su
(1972- ) South Korean author whose first novel Kaebinit (2006; trans Sean Lin Halbert as The Cabinet 2021), deftly Equipoises a Satirical portrait of a late capitalist world in which humans are rigorously defined by surrealistically reductive labels (see Absurdist SF) against an subtextual implication that a ...
Minsky, Marvin
(1927-2016) US computer scientist of considerable renown in the field of artificial intelligence, who at the time of his death was Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and also professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He advised Stanley Kubrick on the plausibility of a talking, sentient Computer by the year 2001, for the film ...
McGrady, Rev T
(1863-1907) Irish-born Roman Catholic priest and author, in the US from early adulthood; in Beyond the Black Ocean (1901), a temperate Lost World within the Arctic Circle turns out to comprise an Archipelago (see also Islands) of societies, each founded by refugees from various countries in the outside world, strays from America inhabiting the island of Toadia, and so forth. The original ...
Wallace, John
(1892-1968) Australian author of Invasion (1940), a very Near Future tale about the danger of Invasion facing Australia. [JC]
Guo Xiaolu
(1973- ) Chinese-born author and filmmaker, in London from 2002, whose early work occasionally touches on sf (see Equipoise). Born after the Cultural Revolution and graduating from the Beijing Film Academy, her prose presents a twenty-first century that both is and isn't the wondrous future promised by the earlier sf of China. Guo's work can hence be parsed as China's answer to the "Gernsback Continuum" espoused by ...
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 ...