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Sunday 19 July 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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Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The
US Digest-size magazine; published Fall 1949 to the present. The first issue was titled simply The Magazine of Fantasy. Until February 1958 published by Fantasy House, Inc, a subsidiary of Mercury Publications, then by Mercury Press until January 2001, then by Gordon Van Gelder's Spilogale, Inc; Lawrence E Spivak (1900-1994) was Publisher from Fall 1949 to July 1954, Joseph W Ferman ...
Lanza, Clara
(1859-1939) US author, a marquise by marriage into the Italian nobility in 1878, whose Mr Perkins' Daughter (1881) flirts with Amnesia on the skirts of the fantastic; her sf novel, Scarabaeus: The Story of an African Beetle (1892) with James Clarence Harvey (1865-1945), features a camera capable of photographing the past (see Time Viewer), a scene in which retinal images identify a murderer (a commonplace of ...
Sansom, C J
(1952-2024) Scottish solicitor and author, almost entirely of crime novels, the most prominent of these being the Shardlake sequence of historical detective mysteries set during the reign of Henry VIII and beginning with Dissolution (2003) [series not listed below]. / He is of sf interest for Dominion (2012), an Alternate History tale set in a 1950s Europe where victorious Germany's client states are governed by Vichy-style ...
Slow Glass
A glass-like substance based on Imaginary Science, which in effect has a refractive index so huge that light takes significant time – from seconds to many years – to pass through a sheet or block of the material. It thus functions as a limited Time Viewer. Bob Shaw coined the term in his fine story "Light of Other Days" (August 1966 Analog), where slow-glass ...
Meyer, J A
(? - ) Author of a few solo short stories beginning with "Guess Again" (May 1951 Astounding), and two collaborations with Alan E Nourse: the short "The Sign of the Tiger" (May 1958 Amazing) which was expanded as the sf novel The Invaders Are Coming! (May 1958 Amazing as "The Sign of the Tiger"; 1959; vt ...
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 ...