SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Willmot, Eric
(1938-2014) Australian author whose Near Future sf novel, Below the Line (1991), describes the consequences of an Indonesian Invasion: Australia is broken into two Dystopias, as most Australians view this outcome, and run on Asian rules. The narrative itself expresses relatively little alarm – Willmot was of Aboriginal birth – and the ending is optimistic. [JC]
Oulipo
A term standing for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which might be translated as "workshop of potential literature". Oulipo is an extremely selfconscious international literary movement founded in 1960 by the French authors Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais (1901-1984). Over the years Oulipo's members and proponents have included many internationally known fabulists and magic realists such as Harry ...
Mason, Daniel
(1976- ) US doctor and author who remains best known for his first novel, The Piano Tuner (2002), an ostensibly nonfantastic tale which follows the eponymous expert into the heart of 1886 Burma, where a chthonic myth-fomenting physician's piano must be tuned in order for him to bring harmony to conflicting factions. Analogies with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899; 1902) have been noted. Several of the ...
West, Julian
Pseudonym of unidentified UK author (? -? ); Julian West is the name of the protagonist of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). The novel published under this name (see Sequels by Other Hands), My Afterdream: A Sequel to the Late Mr Bellamy's Looking Backward (1900), is a spoofish Satire on the original ...
Kornblatt, Marc
(1954- ) US filmmaker, screenwriter and author, in Israel from 2019; he has published contributions to two Shared World series: Flame of the Inquisition (1986) and Mission to World War II (1986) with Susan Nanus (see World War Two) for the Time Machine sequence; and Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party (1987) for the Time Traveler sequence. ...
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 ...