SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 February 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Closed Universe
This term is in no sense a synonym for Pocket Universe, a literary term which describes a particular kind of story; nor is it here used in its cosmological sense. A closed universe is a work or series whose characters and venues remain strictly under its author's control, and which is not open to fans or others to make uncopyrighted use of in Fanzines. In this sense, a Shared-World enterprise may ...
Galton, Francis
(1822-1911) UK geneticist, eugenicist and author, grandson of Erasmus Darwin, and a speculative thinker from his early years: The Telotype; a Printing Electric Telegraph (1849 chap [dated 1850]) describes the use of typewriters (not yet invented) to convey messages electrically over long distances. He is of course most important in sf terms for coining the word Eugenics, which he defined as "the science of improving ...
Voermans, Paul
(1960- ) Australian author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Broken Butterfly" in The View from the Edge: A Workshop of Science Fiction Stories (anth 1977) edited by George Turner. His first novel, And Disregards the Rest (1992), mixes sf and Magic Realism into a somewhat spatchcocked tale of Near-Future Australia, mixing ...
Hayne, Coe
(1875-1961) US Baptist minister and author, often on Native American topics (he is of a generation to refer exclusively to "Indians", for whom he felt a deep sympathy); of his novels, two Young Adult tales featuring Indian Lost Races are of moderate interest, The City in the Clouds: A Tale of the Last Inca (1919 chap), about a South American City still under Incan rule, and ...
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 ...