SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 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 7 July 2026
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Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The
1. Radio series (1978, 1980). BBC Radio 4. Written and created by Douglas Adams, produced by Simon Brett (first episode) and Geoffrey Perkins (subsequent episodes). Cast includes Peter Jones as The Book, Simon Jones as Arthur Dent, Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect, Stephen Moore as Marvin the Paranoid Android, Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox and Susan Sheridan as Trillian. Six 30-minute episodes broadcast ...
World War Three
Following the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs which ended World War Two, a third world War involving nuclear Holocaust became the recurring nightmare of twentieth-century sf throughout the Cold War decades and even beyond. Often it was tacitly assumed that a third world war would constitute the final instalment of a worldwide state of conflict that began in 1914 and whose ...
Barth, John
(1930-2024) US academic and author, one of the central fabulists (see Fabulation) of his generation of writers, noted for a sometimes relentless experimentalism, an inability or disinclination to seize upon the moment of story he famously articulated in "The Literature of Exhaustion" (August 1967 The Atlantic), where postmodern (see Postmodernism and SF) writers are presented as miming the genuine stories before ...
Hambly, Barbara
(1951- ) US author, primarily of Fantasy, married to George Alec Effinger (1998-2000), though they remained close until his death in 2002. She entered genre publishing with the Darwath Trilogy fantasy sequence comprising The Time of the Dark (1982), The Walls of Air (1983) and The Armies of Daylight (1983). In these a historian and a biker from Los Angeles ...
New American Library
US paperback-publishing company founded in 1948 by Kurt Enoch and Victor Weybright, who purchased the American assets of Penguin Books to form New American Library of World Literature. From that date until 1963, when it began publishing occasional hardcovers, NAL (as it was known) focused exclusively upon mass market books, to be sold in pharmacies and newsstands on paperback "spinners". It published 40 titles its first year and 60 the following year, under ...
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 ...