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Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Burg, Swan
(? - ) US author, possibly pseudonymous. The three protagonists of his sf novel, The Light of Eden; Or, a Historical Narrative of the Barbarian Age: A Scientific Discovery (1896), are shipwrecked on a mysterious Island near Borneo, where they find a Lost Race whose token leader, a white woman, is imprisoned there. Fortunately, an Airship conveys the four ...
Bantam Books
Large US publishing house, a general publisher, mainly of paperbacks, rather than an sf specialist. It was founded in 1945 by Ian Ballantine, but he left in 1952 to form Ballantine Books because he wanted to publish paperback originals, whereas Bantam's list was almost entirely of reprints – although one early sf paperback original (but not published as sf) from Bantam was Shot in the Dark (anth 1950) edited by Judith ...
Serial Experiments Lain
Japanese animated tv series (1998). Triangle Staff/Pioneer LDC. Producers include Yasuyuki Ueda. Writer: Chiaki J Konaka. Directors include: Ryūtarō Nakamura and Lia Sargent. Voice cast includes Yōko Asada, Shō Hayami and Kaori Shimizu. Thirteen 24-minute episodes. Colour. / Some days after her Suicide, a girl's classmates receive emails from her saying that she now lives in the Wired, an expanded ...
Vidal, Gore
(1925-2012) US playwright, screenwriter, journalist and author, from the 1950s until 2003 resident in Italy, active from around 1945; though most of his work was nonfantastic, he is of interest in the context of this encyclopedia for a surprising range of works of the fantastic, exhibiting a cavalier intimacy with his material that makes it hard to think of him as a Mainstream Writer of SF. He is also of interest for several volumes of essays, ...
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 ...