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Tuesday 15 July 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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Linder, D Barry
Pseudonym of US author Elizabeth Lorinda DuBreuil (1924-1980) for Libido 23 (1969), a fairly soft sf pornography tale involving enhanced Sex. [JC]
Valentine, James
(1961- ) Australian author whose Young Adult JumpMan sequence, beginning with JumpMan: Rule 1: Don't Touch Anything (2002), is predicated to comic effect on the fantasy rule that the Hero of a tale must do that which is forbidden. In very loose sf terms, the Time Travel stories of the series follow the consequences of this rule. [JC]
Eagleton, Terry
Working name of UK journalist, critic, literary theorist and author Terence Eagleton (1943- ), active from the mid-1960s. The combination of an adventurous and contentious Marxism (shaped in part by his long combative association with Raymond Williams), and a sophisticatedly undoctrinaire quasi-Christian theism (which noncombatants might fail to distinguish from deism, even as heated as here) marks him as being not dishonourable of ...
Matiushin, Mikhail
(1861-1934) Russian Futurist artist and composer. The music he composed for the avant-garde opera Pobieda iad sopitsem ["Victory over the Sun"] (1921) has mostly been lost, although both the libretto (by Aleksei Kruchenykh, 1886-1968, in the invented language "Zaum") and accounts of the original performances remain. The narrative of the opera concerns a group of astronauts who wage war upon the Sun, destroying and burying it in order to release a new, ...
Holy War
Board and counter Wargame (1979). Metagaming Concepts. Designed by Lynn Willis. / Holy War's framing narrative describes the creation of a Pocket Universe in which time passes at a greatly accelerated rate by a vast alien entity. After the construction is complete, this being realizes that life has appeared on one of the planets orbiting the handful of stars in its microverse. While the entity is considering the ...
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 ...