SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 5 September 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 31 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Murray, Will
Working name of US author William Patrick Murray (1953-2026), who showed an interest throughout his career in Superheroes of the Pulp tradition (on which he was a known authority) such as Doc Savage, about which figure he wrote the nonfiction Secrets of Doc Savage (1981 chap). In this context he had been literary agent for Lester Dent's estate since 1979. ...
Piece of Phantasmagoria, A
Japanese animated tv series (1995). Original title Phantasmagoria. Shigeru Tamura Studio. Directed and written by Shigeru Tamura. Fifteen five-minute episodes. Colour. / A series of fifteen shorts each ending with its narrator explaining how, whilst travelling the realm of dreams, they discovered the little planet Phantasmagoria, from which the story comes (see Life on Other Worlds). They are usually ...
Llewellyn, Alun
(1903-1988) UK lawyer and author active in several genres, whose nonfiction generally focuses on Wales, as with his first known publication, "The Emperor of Britain": King Arthur and his Relation to Wales (lecture delivered 10 December 1930; 1930 chap). Work of some interest includes the political Satires assembled in Confound Their Politics (coll 1934), each tale set in a different imaginary country, and the amused faux-naif ...
Capon, Paul
(1911-1969) UK author who also worked for many years in film and television production as an editor – working on three mid-1930s films for Maurice Elvey (1887-1967), including The Clairvoyant (1934) – and administrator, ending his career as head of the Film Department of Independent Television News (1963-1967). From 1942 he wrote fairly copiously in various genres, including detective and children's stories: 36 novels and one nonfiction book in all. He began writing sf ...
Lewis, De Witt
(1864-1932) US handyman, farmer, postmaster and author of one sf novel, A Trip to the North Pole and Beyond to Civilization (1912), in which Arctic explorers discover a Lost World containing survivors of Atlantis, who have established a socialist Utopia which benignly controls property in order to enhance production. [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 ...