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Thursday 5 March 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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Grant, Rob
(1955-2026) UK author, initially best known under the collaborative pseudonym Grant Naylor for his work on the Red Dwarf (1988-current) Television series (which see for discussion). Only one related novel, Grant's solo Backwards (1996), has not been published under this name; as the title suggests, the central sf theme in Backwards is that of ...
Green, Joseph
(1931-2026) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" in New Worlds for February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus stories (not all sf) have ...
Simmons, Dan
(1948-2026) US elementary school teacher circa 1971-1987 and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine for April 1982, and who was for some time thought of primarily as an author of tales of Horror, some of which – along with sf and Fantasy stories – were assembled ...
Botten, Bill
(1935- ) UK artist, originally a graphic designer; he then worked as an art director for Sphere Books before turning freelance, at least half of this work – over 100 covers – being for the publisher Jonathan Cape, mostly in the 1970s and early 1980s. His covers for Cape in particular were brightly coloured, sophisticated highly imaginative, and were sometimes infused with surrealistic humour. Noteworthy instances of his approach include his cover for John T ...
Entropy
In its strict meaning, "entropy" is a thermodynamics term, first used by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) in 1850 to describe the amount of heat that must be put into a closed system to bring it to a given state. The Second Law of Thermodynamics – often stated in terms of work as "it is impossible to produce work by transferring heat from a cold body to a hot body in any self-sustaining process" – can alternatively be rendered: "Entropy always increases in any closed ...
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 ...