SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 14 February 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Porter, Henry
(1953- ) UK journalist and author, whose The Master of the Fallen Chairs (2005) is a Young Adult Timeslip tale set in a house which, riven by a temporal fault line, registers new deaths, whenever they occur, through the sequential toppling over of the thirteen eponymous chairs. [JC]
Egan, Jennifer
(1962- ) US author whose early short fiction – most of it smilingly disjunctive (see Postmodernism and SF) and some of it of direct fantastic interest – was assembled in Emerald City: The Collected Works of Jennifer Egan (coll 1993; exp vt Emerald City 1996). The protagonist of her second novel, Look at Me (2001), a model with an artificial face, transacts a hallucinated ...
Spaceway
US Digest-size magazine, in two series. The first series had eight issues December 1953 to June 1955, and the second series, four issues, January 1969 to May/June 1970, published by William L Crawford's Fantasy Publishing Company Inc in Los Angeles; the subtitle "Stories of the Future" was changed to "Science Fiction" from December 1954. The title was taken from the UK film ...
Roenbeck, Patricia
(? - ) US author of the romantic Space Opera Golden sequence beginning with Golden Temptress (1991), which follows the erotic adventures of a shipwrecked young woman on a Starship representing the local Galactic Empire. [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 ...