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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 ...
Peacock, Thomas Love
(1785-1866) UK businessman, poet and author, with the East India Company 1819-1856, active initially as a poet from before 1805; his first full-length fiction, Headlong Hall (dated 1816 but 1815), is a discussion novel or symposium, set in the Welsh country estate of Squire Harry Headlong ab-Rhaiader, the Gothic description of which is fantastically exaggerated; the tale features a series of monomaniacal talking heads, whose individual maggots govern their names and natures and ...
Vaughn, S K
Pseudonym of an unidentified American (? - ) screenwriter and author of thrillers, whose sf debut under this name is Across the Void (2019), a Space Opera whose protagonist awakens, apparently suffering from Memory Edit or perhaps straightforward trauma, as her NASA-built ship is broken and she is alone, except expectedly for an attendant AI. Her task is ...
Rushdie, Salman
(1947- ) Indian-born author, in the UK (and elsewhere) from adolescence, and long a UK citizen. His fame derives not solely from the illegal fatwa, or death "sentence", proclaimed against him by the Islamic theocracy of Iran for The Satanic Verses (1988), which caused his near-death in 2022; but also, and far more importantly, from all his previous work, beginning with the complex and witty, legend-like Grimus (1975), a ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Film (2017). EuropaCorp presents a Valerian SAS and TF1 Films production with the participation of OCS and TF1 and in association with the Belga Film Fund, BNP Paribas, Fundamental Films, Novo Pictures, Orange Studio, River Road Entertainment and Universum Film GmbH. Directed by Luc Besson. Written by Besson, based on the Comic series Valérian and Laureline (November 1967-March 2018) by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières. Cast ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...