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Saturday 8 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 3 February 2025
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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Computer Wargame
Term used by this encyclopedia to describe a form of Videogame descended (sometimes quite remotely) from the Wargame. The subject of the Computer Wargame is War, but (unlike First Person Shooters) success does not depend on reaction speed and manual dexterity. Instead, the gameplay is focused on intellectual contests of strategy and tactics; real time variants typically ...
Soane, John
(1753-1837) UK architect and author, active in the first capacity from the early 1770;, now perhaps best known for his forty-five years with the Bank of England, for which he served as architect and builder of its paradigm headquarters (demolished in the twentieth century). Along with earlier paintings by Joseph Gandy (1771-1843), he commissioned "A Bird's-eye View of the Bank of England" (1830), which depicts the bank in ruins at some point in the moderately distant future (see ...
Hayter, Alethea
(1911-2006) Egyptian-born editor and author, in the UK from early adulthood, never affiliated to an academic institution, whose nonfiction work (not unusually for a non-institutional scholar) was significantly innovative; she is probably best known for the bio-critical study, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), which focuses attentively on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Her early novels as by J C Fennessy include Eden Island (1941), whose ...
Lowell, Percival
(1855-1916) US astronomer, best known for making the calculations which led, in 1931, to the discovery of the purported ninth planet, Pluto (see Outer Planets), though that distant world is no longer regarded as a genuine planet; its name was chosen in part because its first two letters were Lowell's initials. While he wrote no works which could be regarded as genuine sf, Lowell contributed immeasurably to the genre when he built upon the observations of ...
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 ...