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Friday 6 March 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.
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Grant, Rob
(1955-2026) UK author, initially best known under the collaborative pseudonym Grant Naylor for his work on the Red Dwarf (1988-current) Television series (which see for discussion). Only one related novel, Grant's solo Backwards (1996), has not been published under this name; as the title suggests, the central sf theme in Backwards is that of ...
Green, Joseph
(1931-2026) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" in New Worlds for February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus stories (not all sf) have ...
Simmons, Dan
(1948-2026) US elementary school teacher circa 1971-1987 and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine for April 1982, and who was for some time thought of primarily as an author of tales of Horror, some of which – along with sf and Fantasy stories – were assembled ...
Pancras, PJ
Working name of Pamela Pancras (1966- ) and Jeroen Pancras (1969- ), a Dutch couple of genre interest for their Planet Paradroid series, projected as a trilogy, although with the publication of the prequel novella Death Space (2019), this appears to already be approaching at least four parts. / The namesake first volume, Planet Paradroid (2015; trans Grayson Bray Morris 2017) was published in Dutch as by ...
O'Connell, Jack
(1959-2024) US author of a noir thriller sequence set in the small, stressed New England city of Quinsigamond – comprising Box Nine (1992), Wireless (1993), The Skin Palace (1996) and Word Made Flesh (1999) – and transparently based on his hometown, Worcester, Massachusetts. The fracture line of Equipoisal anxiety, as usual in this kind of tale, can be traced through the moves of the ...
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 ...