SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 7 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
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Knox, Ronald A
(1888-1957) UK priest, journalist and author, who served in military intelligence during World War One; ordained an Anglican priest in 1912, he converted to Catholicism in 1917, becoming a Catholic priest in 1919. Among his many books are several well-regarded if somewhat dull detective novels, volumes of Parodies, a new translation of the Testaments, and some genre work. ...
Fawkes, Frank Attfield
(1849-1941) UK industrialist and author, mostly of nonfiction, whose one sf novel, Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe: Being a Record of Some Strange Adventures in the Remarkable Career of a Political and Social Reformer Who Was Famous at the Commencement of the Twentieth Century (1895) as by X, is a Future War tale dominated by intrigues surrounding the complex triumph of a British reformer known as Marmaduke who proposes a European state, and after his ...
Dooner, Pierton W
(1844-1907) Canadian-born editor and author who immigrated to the USA in 1861. His Near Future tale, Last Days of the Republic (1880), was the first US Yellow Peril novel that could be described in sf terms, and demonstrates the terribly common dynamic by which a guilty party, or nation, feels compelled to transfer its guilt to the victim or victim-nation: in 1880, the year of the book's publication, Chinese coolies ...
Owen, David
(? - ) UK journalist and author of Young Adult novels. His first, Panther (2015), rims Fantastika edgily in the story of a panther loose in London that the protagonist hopes to trap, in order to lift himself from depression caused in part by living in the suburbs. In The Fallen Children: They Will Rise (2017) a similar world is suddenly ...
Quinet, Edgar
(1803-1875) French author, mostly of idealist nonfiction, active from the 1820s, in exile during the reign of the second Buonaparte 1851-1870. Of sf interest is Ahasuérus (portions appeared 1833 Revue des Deux Mondes; 1834; trans Brian Stableford as Ahasuerus 2013), which as not infrequently found in works of Proto SF combines divine and secular narratives in its recounting of 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 ...