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Saturday 11 April 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.
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Phantom, The
African jungle-dwelling Comics Superhero partially inspired by Tarzan and created by Lee Falk – also the creator of Mandrake the Magician – as the star of a daily newspaper strip whose first appearance was on 17 February 1936 and which continues to be widely syndicated today. At the outset the strip was briefly drawn by Falk ...
Kurland, Michael
(1938- ) US author who began publishing sf in September 1964 with "Elementary" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with Laurence M Janifer, and Ten Years to Doomsday (1964) with Chester Anderson. The latter is a lightly written alien-Invasion novel, full of harmless violence in space, in which a planetary society ...
Sullivan, Tricia
(1968- ) US-born author, in UK from 1995, who has also written as by Valery Leith; married during the 1990s (dates unknown) to Todd Wiggins. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Morpheus" in Discoveries (anth 1995) edited by Alan Lothian; most of her work since that point has been in long forms. Her first novel, Lethe (1995), is partly set in the distant Near Future ...
Trancers
Film (1984; vt Future Cop). Lexyn/Empire. Produced and directed by Charles Band. Written by Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo. Cast includes Helen Hunt, Michael Stefani and Tim Thomerson. 76 minutes. Colour. / Band apparently learned from his early, mostly bad movies, for this small film is confident, stylish sf. Future cop Jack Deth (Thomerson) travels back from 2247 CE to present-day Los Angeles in search of dangerous mystic Whistler (Stefani), who ...
Droid [2]
Also known as "{species}droid" and "{species}DROID". US electro-funk band, whose debut release The Systematik Eviloution of {species}DROID (2005) mashes genre topics into an eclectic musical hybrid of contemporary dance styles. The name is presumably based on the sf coinage Droid as popularized in Star Wars (1977). [AR]
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 ...