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Friday 16 October 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 12 October 2026
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Snedeker, Caroline Dale
(1871-1956) US author, initially of children's books, some of them depicting life in versions of New Harmony, the town of her birth being named after the communitarian Utopia New Harmony created by her grandfather Robert Owen (1771-1858). Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community (1917) is a fictionalized (and fantasticated) biography of an experimental Scientist and early resident of New Harmony, Indiana, which had ...
Stephenson, Neal
(1959- ) US author whose first two novels – The Big U (1984) and Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (1988) – both convey a strong sense that sf turns are just around the next page, but neither of which can justly be read as sf. The first is a gonzo college caper, told rather in the style of John Landis's film, National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), in which a vast "Megaversity", funded by an involvement in radioactive waste ...
Lost Worlds [comic]
US Comic (1952). Standard Comics. Two issues, numbered #5 and #6 (see Fantastic Worlds for more information). Artists include Ross Andru, John Celardo, Jack Katz, Art Saaf and Alex Toth. Four comic strips and one text story per issue, plus one-page non-fiction strips and a cartoon strip. / In #5's opening story "The City that Escaped Tomorrow" a strange hoop of light appears in a quiet ...
Yefremov, Ivan
(1908-1972) Russian palaeontologist and author, a leading figure in the renaissance of Soviet sf (see Russia); his surname has also been transliterated as Efremov. He began writing "geographical" sf on a modest scale in the 1940s, assembling his early work in Vstretcha Nad Tuskaroroi (coll 1944; trans M and N Nicholas as A Meeting Over Tuscarora; And Other Adventure Stories 1946), Piat' Rumbo ["Five Wind's Quarters"] (coll ...
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 ...