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Saturday 14 March 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 March 2026
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du Maurier, Daphne
(1907-1989) UK author, granddaughter of George du Maurier, famous (against her will: she thought of herself as an author of psychological studies without genre taint) for "romances" so darkly demanding that the psychic abysses they portray have reminded readers of the work of Franz Kafka. Her first publications, tales written and mostly published from around 1927 to 1930, were assembled in Early Stories (coll ...
Fenn, George Manville
(1831-1909) UK teacher, publisher, editor and author, of whose 170 or more novels and collections, mostly for the Young Adult market, some are of sf interest, including The Golden Magnet: A Tale of the Land of the Incas (1884), a Lost Race tale set in South America; The Man With a Shadow (1888 3vols), in which a Mad Scientist's attempts to generate a state of ...
Moseley, Maboth
(1906-1975) UK author of the Near Future War Upon Women: A Topical Drama (1934), in which a highly modern War is seen in terms of its savage effect on women (see Feminism). Moseley is also the author of Irascible Genius: A Life of Charles Babbage, Inventor (1964) (see Charles Babbage). [JC]
Kuppord, Skelton
Pseudonym of UK academic, educationist and author John Adams (1857-1934), prolific author of nonfiction under his own name. As Kuppord, he wrote several tales, usually for boys; The Uncharted Island (dated 1899 but 1898) engages its cast Underground in borderline sf activities beneath a South Pacific Island; his sf novel proper, A Fortune from the Sky (dated 1903 but 1902), features several ...
Smythe, James
(1980- ) UK author who writes Young Adult fiction as J P Smythe; his first novel, Hereditation (2010) is an essentially nonfantastic Gothic set in New York. Of sf interest is The Testimony (2012), in which a Dystopian Near Future world is confronted with a seemingly irrefutable annunciation – perhaps in the very ...
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 ...