SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 17 October 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 12 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Lakshminarayan, Lavanya
(? - ) Indian Videogame designer and author whose first book of fiction, Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future (coll of linked stories/fixup 2020; rev vt The Ten Percent Thief 2023), sophisticatedly overrides any restrictive classification of her portrait of the lives of twenty inhabitants of the distant Near Future Apex City, members of the privileged ...
Colcord, Lincoln
(1883-1947) US newspaperman, songwriter, translator and author, mostly of sea stories; The Drifting Diamond (July-August 1912 Popular Magazine; 1912) is an adventure tale recounted with a Club Story frame in which the giant stone exercises Basilisk-like power over its successive owners. [JC]
One Million Years B.C.
Film (1966). Hammer/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Don Chaffey. Written by Michael Carreras, based on the screenplay of One Million B.C. (1940). Cast includes Martine Beswick, Robert Brown, John Richardson and Raquel Welch. 100 minutes. Colour. / The first of Hammer's several stone-age movies (see also When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth), this is a remake of the ...
Future Histories
The grouping of generally independent-seeming sf stories into an overarching "History of the Future" is a device most famously used by Robert A Heinlein, who caught the imagination of 1940s Fandom with a timeline featuring colourful labels like "The Crazy Years" – summarized by a sequence of mildly bizarre "1969" newspaper headlines in Methuselah's Children (July-September 1941 Astounding; rev ...
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 ...