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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 ...
Atkins, John
(1916-2009) UK teacher and author, who also published under his full name, John Alfred Atkins; he worked for Mass Observation before World War Two. He was literary editor of Tribune before George Orwell, and from March 1944 to 1947 edited The New Saxon Pamphlets #1-#3 (the first containing his short "The Apopleptic Revolution", in which all who permit themselves intemperate fury, from radio announcers to prime ministers, die with a click and an ...
Grey, Edward
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? - ) of Concealed for Thirty Years: Being the Narrative of One E Grey (1890), a Lost Race novel set on an Island in the Pacific, where a culture of English colonists has survived since the Middle Ages. [JC]
Lombardi, Tom
(? - ) US author of a Young Adult novel, My Summer on Earth (2008), in which an Alien named Clint is sent to Earth to persuade another alien, disguised as a film actor whose first name is Clint, to come back home; the tale is spoofish but frequently sharp. [JC]
Thorpe, David
(1954- ) UK author of a Young Adult Near Future sf novel, Hybrids (2007), set in a world afflicted by a virus that causes young humans to acquire a Cyborg-like affinity with high-tech devices, and ultimately to "become" those devices. The response of the world's governments is Dystopian. Stormteller (2014) ...
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 ...