SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 25 June 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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Benford, Gregory
(1941- ) US astrophysicist and author; in 1971 he was appointed an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of California, Irvine, rising to Professor of Plasma Physics and Astrophysics in 1979, a position he held until 2006, when he formally resigned in order to participate in a new bio-tech corporation dedicated to unplumbing the genetic governors of ageing in humans. His first involvement in sf was with Fandom: he edited a notable ...
Bernal, J D
(1901-1971) UK physicist and political philosopher, Marxist polemicist, whose The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929 chap) manages, with astonishing clarity and concision, to provide models for the understanding and exploitation of the future that sf writers – some knowingly, some ignorant of this small work – would mine for decades. Its influence was acknowledged by Olaf ...
Kohout, Pavel
(1928- ) Czech poet, playwright, author and, since his emigration in 1978, émigré activist; his relations with post-Communist Czech culture have not been easy, and he remains in Vienna. Though his early poetry had been pro-Communist, his politics changed and his work remained unpublished in Czechoslovakia in the period 1968-1989; some was published there in 1990. His sf novel, which deals with the political ...
Roth, Philip
(1933-2018) US author, along with Thomas Pynchon the most influential writer of his generation still active well into the twenty-first century; he is probably still best known for Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel whose sophisticated and often comic treatment of the freedoms and imprisonments of Sex is fantastically furthered (see Fabulation) in The Breast (1972), in which a ...
Miller, Leo E
(1887-1952) US explorer and author, his nonfiction tending to focus on his travels in South America, and of the Hidden People sequence of Lost Race tales for boys, comprising The Hidden People: The Story of a Search for Incan Treasure (1920), In the Tiger's Lair (1921) and (less interestingly) The Jungle Pirates (1925). Miller's realistic handling of geography and the natural sciences makes more embarrassing his ...
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 ...