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Thursday 19 June 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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Balzac, Honoré de
(1799-1850) French author whose enormous oeuvre – currently assembled in the Pléïade series in an edition over 20,000 pages long [not listed below] – is like Jules Verne a bibliographer's nightmare. Of his numerous early sensational novels, few translations seem to exist, and his later supernatural fiction appears in very various and chameleon guises. But some titles are of genre interest: ...
Survivalist Fiction
During the near-half century of Cold War after the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan in 1945, nuclear Holocausts were a commonplace plot device in various genres of popular fiction. Some novels took readers teasingly up to the brink without actually carrying them into the terminal moments; Cold War thrillers of this sort are not generally treated in this encyclopedia. A rather larger number of novels treated the final war as a given, ...
Gerard, Louise
(1878-1970) UK author, almost exclusively of romances, some of them literally bodice-rippers, featuring heroines who are frequently abducted, bound, raped, and who then fall in love with the aristocratic perp; her first novel, The Golden Centipede (1910), features, on the other hand, a dominatrix white queen, a She figure who rules a Lost Race in the heart of darkest Africa. [JC]
Papp, Desiderio
(1895-1993) Hungarian historian of science, in Europe until forced to flee by Nazi Germany, and mostly in Argentina from 1942, in Chile from 1961; his first name is given variously as Desiderio or Desiderius though in its original, Hungarian form it was almost certainly Dezső. His nonfiction speculative text, Zukunft und Ende der Welt: Ein Buch über die Geschicke von Menschheit und Erde (1932; trans Henry James Stenning as Creation's Doom 1934), assesses ...
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 ...