SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 17 June 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 15 June 2026
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Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Mitsuse Ryū
Pseudonym of Kimio Iizuka (1928-1999) a Japanese author and founding member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan (SFWJ), much respected as a prose author and sometime poet in his lifetime, but now more likely to be remembered for popular Manga editions of his work, many of which feature human characters overwhelmed by the machinations of vastly superior intellects and technologies. With an interest in sf inspired by reading the ...
Van der Graaf Generator
UK prog-rock band comprising Peter Hammill, Hugh Robert Banton (1949- ) and Guy Evans (1947- ). Highly regarded in the narrow world of English prog, the group released a series of musically soursweet and ornately complex albums whose obscure lyrics trace out fantastical versions of ordinary life that shade, often, into a more structured fabulation. The first album, The Aerosol Grey Machine (1969), ...
Nestvold, Ruth
(1958- ) US translator and author, now in Germany. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Latency Time" in Asimov's for July 2001, which was assembled with other tales involving Climate Change as The Future, Imperfect: Six Dystopian Short Stories (coll 2012). Further collections include Almost All the Way Home from the Stars (coll 2013) with Jay ...
Bensen, D R
(1927-1997) US editor and author, his novels being usually pseudonymous. The two anthologies he has edited, The Unknown: 11 Stories (anth 1963) and The Unknown Five (anth 1964), are both fantasy and (all but one story) compiled from Unknown. He was more important within the sf field for his editorship of Pyramid Books 1957-1967, a period during which that firm became a significant producer of sf novels in ...
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 ...