SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 11 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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Rackham, Martin
(? - ) UK author of The Source: Earth Voyage (1997), what may have been intended as the first volume of a series in which Aliens mount an Invasion of Earth in order to gain access to a desperately needed Power Source; but the sequence seems not to have progressed. [JC]
Hill, William Boyle
(circa 1861-1953) Irish author, resident in Australia, whose novel A New Earth and a New Heaven (1936) is of exceedingly moderate sf interest for its advocacy of a garden-city subtopian future (see City), but which comes somewhat to life on its protagonists' visit to a Lost World – in the heart of Australia – whose inhabitants are in touch with Mars. [JC]
Fabulation
We do not intend to make here – or to quote – any sustained theoretical argument about the nature of fabulation as the term was conceived by Robert Scholes in The Fabulators (1967) and amplified in his Structural Fabulation (1975). Our inevitable starting point is Genre SF, a central concern throughout this encyclopedia being to focus on its nature and upon its evolution and exfoliations over ...
Red Dwarf
UK tv series (1988-current). A Paul Jackson Production for BBC North West; from Series IV, a Grant Naylor Production for BBC North. Produced by Ed Bye, Rob Grant, Doug Naylor. Directed by Bye. Written Grant, Naylor as Grant Naylor; in season VII, Naylor, Paul Alexander, Kim Fuller, Robert Llewellyn; in VIII, Naylor, Alexander. Cast includes Craig Charles ...
Swann, S Andrew
Pseudonym of US author Steven A Swiniarski (1966- ), much of whose sf has been constructed as a loose Future History beginning with the Terran Confederacy: Moreau sequence – comprising Forests of the Night (1993), Emperors of the Twilight (1994) and Specters of the Dawn (1994), all three assembled as Moreau Omnibus (omni 2003), plus ...
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 ...