SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 22 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Underwood, Michael R
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Last Tango in Gamma Sector" in Crossed Genres for June 2010. His first series, the Ree Reyes sequence beginning with Geekomancy (2012 ebook). is fantasy. He is of sf interest for the Genrenauts sequence of Young Adult tales beginning with The Shootout Solution (2015), in which a ...
Mackelworth, R W
(1930-2000) UK author and insurance salesman who began publishing sf with "The Statue" for New Worlds in January 1963 and produced some above-average sf adventure novels, usually involving complex but rarely jumbled plotting, and an Earth somehow in danger. They include Firemantle (1968; vt The Diabols 1969), Tiltangle (1970), in which melodramatic Climate Change has confined humanity to ...
Stilgebauer, Edward
(1868-1936) German editor, journalist and author, whose expression of pacifist sentiments during World War One may have influenced his departure from Germany; his pacifist novel, Inferno: Roman aus dem Weltkrieg (1916; trans C Thieme as Love's Inferno 1916), was banned in his native land, and he lived in Italy from 1917 until his death. In 1938 he was posthumously stripped of his PhD by the Nazis, and his ...
Johns, Willy
(? - ) US author known only for The Fabulous Journey of Hieronymus Meeker (1954), a Fantastic Voyage tale in which a Gulliver-like protagonist (see Gulliver; Jonathan Swift) travels in the good ship Jeemarad to a planet where he discovers a Utopia based on constant transformation. [JC]
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 ...