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Monday 9 February 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.
Site updated on 6 February 2026
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Sallis, James
(1944-2026) US musician, poet and author, briefly active in New Worlds during its Michael Moorcock-directed New-Wave phase; he began to publish work of genre interest in this context with "Kazoo" (August 1967 New Worlds) and co-edited the magazine 1968-1969. His clearly acknowledged models in the French avant garde and the gnomic brevity of much of his work ...
Lore, Pittacus
House Name owned by James Frey (1969- ) – not to be confused with James N Frey – a serially controversial author and screenwriter whose works include the heavily fabricated addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) and the contemporary Messiah fantasy The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (2011). The Lore house name is associated ...
Samuel, Maurice
(1895-1972) Romanian-born translator and author, in US from 1914, best known for nonfiction studies on Jewish culture and issues. King Mob: A Study of the Present-Day Mind (1930) as by Frank K Notch is an early assault on the totalitarian implications of a Media Landscape created by advertising, in league with governments aspiring to gain mind-control over their citizens. Samuel is of some sf interest for The Devil That Failed ...
Gafla, Ofir Touché
(1968- ) Israeli author whose first novel, Olam Hasof (2004; trans Mitch Ginsburg as The World of the End 2013), begins as an Afterlife fantasy (for Afterlife see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below), with the protagonist's Suicide, which he figures will reunite him with his beloved dead wife. The various worlds into ...
England, Barry
(1932-2009) UK playwright and author whose first novel, Figures in a Landscape (1968), is a chase thriller set in a surreal unnamed South American country; it was filmed as Figures in a Landscape (1970) directed by Joseph Losey. His second novel, No Man's Land (1997), is a Post-Holocaust military thriller focused on a brigade of soldiers in a burnt-out environment who rescue some innocents and kill many who are not, ...
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 ...