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Sunday 16 November 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 10 November 2025
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Peck, Bradford
(1853-1935) US businessman – he was President of a department store in Lewiston, Maine – and author of The World a Department Store: A Story of Life under a Cooperative System (1900), a Sleeper Awakes tale written under the influence of Edward Bellamy; the protagonist, revived in 1925, find himself in the great Cooperative City of Maine, a Utopia built in the shape of an ...
Most Dangerous Man Alive, The
Film (1958). Trans-Global/Columbia. Directed by Allan Dwan. Written by James Leicester, Phillip Rock, based on a story by Rock, Michael Pate. Cast includes Anthony Caruso, Debra Paget, Ron Randell and Elaine Stewart. 82 minutes, cut to 76 minutes. Black and white. / In this unusual blend of sf and crime movie, a framed gangster (Randell) escapes from Prison and hides out in the desert, where he is caught up in a nuclear test (see ...
O'Connell, Charles C
(? - ) Irish author in whose first novel, The Vanishing Island (1957; vt The Vanishing Island: An Irish Entertainment 1958), the mysterious Island of Innishios experiences First Contact through the arrival in a UFO-like Spaceship of an attractive Alien, who introduces the inhabitants ...
White, Steve
Pseudonym of US army officer and author Robert McGarvey (1948- ), most of whose work is Space Opera, often employing Military SF plots, and usually arrayed in series. His first sequence, the Starfire series – partially written with David Weber, who had developed Starfire, the Wargame to which it is ...
Transcendence
If the Singularity represents the point at which the complexity of human, Computer or hybrid human/AI intelligence soars (by definition) beyond the comprehension of pre-singularity minds, transcendence can be considered as a wildcard symbol for what comes after. Thus the general sf consensus is that transcended beings and their affairs cannot be comprehended. That final image of the Star Child in ...
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 ...