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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 ...
de Morgan, John
(1848-1926) UK author who misleadingly claimed to have been born in Ireland; in US (where he worked as a tax collector) from 1880; his name at birth was John Francis Morgan, but he may have changed it legally. He produced fantastic fiction, historical novels, miscellaneous works and Dime Novels, drawing very heavily on the work of H Rider Haggard for models and sources. His adult fantastic fiction included four H Rider ...
Rand, Peter
(1942- ) US author of The Time of the Emergency (1977), an sf novel set in a world subsequent to a nuclear Holocaust – but how much farther into the future it is hard to distinguish – so that the abstract desert and surreal hotel that provide a stage for the four protagonists' shattered behaviour may in fact be described as inhabiting a Ruined Earth. [JC]
Crank!
US Semiprozine, Fall 1993 to #8 (undated 1998), initially quarterly but with a two-year gap before the final issue #8 in Spring 1988, trade paperback format, edited and published by Bryan Cholfin from Cambridge, Massachusetts. / The uncompromising style of Cholfin's Broken Mirrors Press (which has published worthy though uncommercial projects by writers such as David R Bunch and R A Lafferty) ...
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 ...
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 ...