SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 July 2026
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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Games and Sports
This entry deals with games and sports as a theme within sf. Games based on sf are treated under a wide variety of headwords branching out from the Games entry. / Just as sf's concern with the Arts has been dominated by stories about the decline of artistry in a mechanized mass society, so its concern with sports has been much involved with representing the decline of sportsmanship. There was a marked tendency, in sf from the second half ...
First Contact
The most common Communications scenario in sf – often but not always Linguistic in nature – involves the meeting of humans with Aliens. These are generally called first-contact stories, and perhaps the best known of them is "First Contact" (May 1945 Astounding) by Murray Leinster. This poses the problem of contact as a puzzle ...
Tawada Yōko
(1960- ) Japanese author, in Germany since 1982, whose output occupies a liminal space between her native and adopted languages. Graduating from Waseda University in Russian literature, she pursued two further degrees in German-speaking Europe, receiving a doctorate in German literature from the University of Zurich in 2000. Her work has luxuriated and exulted in bilingualism ever since her first published work, the poetry collection ...
Vandel, Jean-Gaston
Joint pseudonym of Belgian authors Jean Libert (1913-1995) and Gaston Vandenpanhuyse (1913-1981), best known for the nonfantastic Coplan FX-18 sequence of thrillers as by Paul Kenny. Their twenty sf novels under the ambitious Anticipations label, used by the publisher Fleuve Noir for a large number of titles in the 1950s, tend to place speculative renderings of various types of society – some Technocratic, some more loosely constructed – ...
Brooks, Byron A
(1845-1911) US inventor (he invented the shift key for the typewriter) and author of Earth Revisited (1893), a Sleeper Awakes tale which espouses a somewhat garbled revision of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888); the reawakened protagonist, after falling in love with his nurse, realizes that she is the Reincarnation of a lost love. All ends well. [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 ...