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Sunday 14 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.
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Kirk, Pauline
(? - ) UK poet and author of The Keepers (1996), a Dystopia set in a Near Future UK run by the eponymous Keepers on lines mildly evocative of George Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four (1949), with fairly rife regimentation and some brainwashing. But a dissident group imports a virus into the Keeper's central ...
Battlezone
Videogame (1998). Activision. Platforms: Win; rev vt Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs, N64 (2000); Amiga (2001). / Battlezone is an innovative Real Time Strategy game, inspired by the largely unrelated arcade tank combat game Battlezone (1980 Atari, Arcade, Others) designed by Ed Rotberg. Its gameplay uses a three-dimensional first person view to combine the physical ...
Grip [2]
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Monster Municipality, or Gog and Magog Reformed: A Dream (1882), a Dystopian prediction that socialist reforms will torture England in 1885; and How John Bull Lost London, or The Capture of the Channel Tunnel (1882), one of the earlier Future-War novels – if not the earliest – to warn against a tunnel ...
Taine, John
Pseudonym for all his fiction of Scottish-born mathematician and author Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960), permanently in US from 1902; under his own name he wrote at least 250 papers and several studies in mathematical history and theory. Taine's first novels were Lost-World tales: The Purple Sapphire (1924), set in Tibet where an ancient race possesses the secret of atomic power; and The Gold Tooth (1927), set in Korea, where another ...
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 ...