SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Nations, Opal L
(1941- ) UK-born author and music critic, in Canada for many years, active from the end of the 1960s and beginning to publish work of genre interest with "Juan Fortune" in New Worlds for January 1969. Strange Faeces (1970-1980), his little magazine of experimental fiction, poetry and art, published Kathy Acker, Thomas M Disch, Marilyn ...
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 ...
Campanella, Tommaso
(1568-1639) Italian philosopher, admitted into the Dominican order at the age of 14. Like Francis Bacon he attacked the reliance of contemporary science on the authority of Aristotle, advocating observation and experiment as the proper routes to knowledge in Philosophia Sensibus Demonstrata ["Philosophy as Demonstrated by the Senses"] (1591; in Latin); at about the same time he first met Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and he supported him against ...
Rotsler, William
(1926-1997) US author and artist who received four Hugos as best fan artist, in 1975, 1979, 1996 and 1997, plus a 1996 Retro Hugo for his 1945 fan art; his huge output of cartoons, many still unpublished, may be remembered as much as his fiction. (An original Rotsler cartoon was tipped into each copy of the final issue of Science-Fiction Five-Yearly.) He began publishing sf with "Ship Me ...
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 ...