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Saturday 19 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.
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Williams, Tess
(1954-2025) UK-born teacher, editor and author, in Australia for many years, there receiving a degree in literature from Curtin University and an MA in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Padwan Affair" in She's Fantastical (anth 1995) edited by Judith Raphael Buckrich and Lucy Sussex. Of sf interest are two novels: Map of Power (1996), set mostly in a ...
Collins, Dale
(1897-1956) Australian author, mostly of sea stories, sometimes as by Stephen Fennimore or Michael Copeland. Of marginal sf interest are Lost (1933) and Ah, Promised Land (1946), which is a Robinsonade. Race the Sun (1936), perhaps more interestingly, features an advanced aircraft capable of stratospheric flight which circumnavigates the world (see Transportation). [JC]
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 ...
Abominable Snowman, The
Film (1957; vt The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas US). Hammer Film Productions/Warner Brothers (UK)/20th Century Fox (US). Produced by Aubrey Baring. Directed by Val Guest. Written by Nigel Kneale, adapted from his BBC teleplay The Creature (30 January 1955). Makeup by Phil Leakey. Cast includes Michael Brill, Robert Brown, Peter Cushing, Arnold Marlé, Wolfe Morris, Maureen O'Connell and Forest Tucker. 91 minutes, cut to ...
Landsberger, Artur
(1876-1933) German author, active and prolific from around 1900 until Nazi persecution – he was Jewish – led to his Suicide; he sometimes gave his first name as Arthur. He is of sf interest for his Near Future Satire Berlin ohne Juden ["Berlin Without Jews"] (1925), which is explicitly based on Hugo Bettauer's ...
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 ...