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Saturday 13 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Cinefex
US Cinema perfect-bound 8 x 9 in magazine printed on slick paper in similar format to a trade paperback. Published by Don Shay/Cinefex LLC. Editors John Duncan, others. 172 issues 1980-2021. Quarterly. / Cinefex grew largely out of publisher Shay's love for the films and visual effects work of Willis H O'Brien, and over the years it remained a cornerstone magazine for those interested in state-of-the-art cinematic ...
Dixon, Royal
(1885-1962) US child actor, botanist, journalist and author, known for having founded the First Church for Animal Rights in 1921 after publishing several books advocating a quasi-pantheistic devotion to all forms of life, beginning with The Human Side of Plants (1914). Of sf interest is The Ape of Heaven (1936), an Apes as Human tale in which a benevolent culture of white human-like apes is found in Africa, one of whom saves a ...
Williamson, Thames
Working name of US screenwriter and author Thomas Ross Williamson (1894-1961) who over a prolific career published some work of genre interest, beginning with The Man Who Cannot Die (1926), set in the eighteenth century, about an elixir that gives Immortality at a cost. Against the Jungle (1933), set in Africa, and The Flint Chipper: A Boy's Story of England in the Stone Age (1940), are ...
Cameron, Kenneth M
(1931-2021) US academic (until the 1980s) and author, mostly of mystery and espionage stories; father of the fantasy author Christian Cameron, who writes as Miles Cameron. His works include two unremarkable sf thrillers, Power Play (1979) under his own name and The Sunset Gun (1983) as by George Bartram. Both are set in the Near Future; the latter, one of four otherwise nonfantastic thrillers with the Bartram byline, features 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 ...