SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 7 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
von Däniken, Erich
(1935- ) Swiss author of a series of purportedly nonfiction books, beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968; trans Michael Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969), which, based on a mass of often suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was visited by at least one Alien spacefaring race before and at the dawn of historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid of ...
Isometric
Term used to describe a form of perspective projection sometimes used in Videogames, particularly in those intended for older hardware, for which it could be technically advantageous. Some mathematical complexities are involved, but in essence an isometric view is one in which the lines of perspective are not linear, as in post-Renaissance European art, but parallel, as in classical Chinese scrolls. Thus objects appear in three dimensions but do not diminish with ...
Moran, Jodi
(1964- ) US author, sister of Daniel Keys Moran, with whom she collaborated on one novel, Terminal Freedom (1997). [JC]
Adlington, L J
(1970- ) UK author of Young Adult titles including the two Pelly D tales, The Diary of Pelly D (2005) and Cherry Heaven (2007). In the first volume, a young boy from City Five finds the buried diaries of Pelly D, which make up the body of the text, and explain how the sanitized Dystopian world of the novel's present has come into being through ethnic cleansing and other ...
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 ...