SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Bova, Ben
(1932-2020) US author and editor who worked as technical editor for Project Vanguard 1956-1958, and science writer for Avco Everett Research Laboratory 1960-1971, before being appointed editor of Analog following the death of John W Campbell Jr in 1971. The magazine had become creatively moribund – although it remained commercially healthy – during the last decade of so of Campbell's editorship. Bova maintained the ...
Ballantyne, R M
(1825-1894) Scottish author whose family fortunes were blighted by the bankruptcy of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) in 1826: his uncle owned the Ballantyne Press, Scott's printer, and his father transcribed Scott's manuscripts in order to preserve their anonymity. His professional experiences in Canada with the Hudson's Bay Company, which began in his teens, shaped his first book, the non-fiction Hudson's Bay; Or, Every-Day Life in the Wilds of North America (1848). Most of his ...
Gibbs, Henry
(1909-1975) UK artist, journalist and author, of whose many novels – several set in South Africa – Pawns in Ice (1948) is of sf interest for its depiction of Arctic explorers held in thrall by a strange Ray. [JC]
Vizzini, Ned
(1981-2013) US journalist and author born Edward Vizzini (name legally changed) who committed Suicide due to profound clinical depression; much of his nonfiction work, assembled in Teen Angst? Naaah (coll 2000), deals in various ways with the ways this illness afflicts adolescents and young men and women, as does his second novel, the nonfantastic It's Kind of a Funny Story (2006). His first novel, the ...
Gems, Jonathan
(1952- ) US screenwriter and author of Mars Attacks! (1996), a Tie to the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks! (1996), which it novelizes. This film's screenplay was also by Gems, based on the "Mars Attacks" series of Topps trading cards (1962); he had earlier co-scripted Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), based on ...
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 ...