SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 December 2025
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 8 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Berliner, Janet
(1939-2012) South African-born author and editor, in the US from the mid-1960s, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Negwenya" as Janet Gluckman in Dragons of Darkness (anth 1981); this is an advance excerpt from her first novel Rite of the Dragon (1981) as Janet Gluckman, a Horror-slanted thriller featuring ancient witchcraft and modern terrorism in a South African setting. The Madagascar Manifesto trilogy ...
Freer, Dave
Working name of South African-born ichthyologist and author David Freer (1959- ), in Australia from 2010, much of whose work has been collaborations with Eric Flint, though The Forlorn (1999), his first novel, is a solo singleton set on a colony planet where humans and Aliens vie for access to a lost Matter Transmission technology. Series with Eric ...
Collins, Bridget
(1981- ) UK actor and author active in the latter capacity, usually as by B R Collins, from the publication of The Traitor Game (2008), the first of several Young Adult novels, some containing fantasy elements. She is of wider interest for her two adult novels. The Binding (2019) is a fantasy about the ability of Story to tell the life of its teller. The Betrayals (2020) is no more fantasy than ...
Garfinkle, Richard
(1961- ) US author whose first novel, Celestial Matters (1996), is an Alternate Cosmos tale in which the Ptolemaic universe is real: celestial bodies are positioned in crystalline spheres around Earth, which is the centre of the universe; travel to the planets is via sailing ship. His second novel, All of an Instant (1999), posits a "location" outside of Time and space called the ...
Roberts, Adam
(1965- ) UK academic (currently Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London) and author who began his two intertwined writing careers – as an sf novelist and as a critic – in the same year with the release of his first work of fiction, Salt (2000), and his first work of scholarship, Science Fiction (2000; rev vt Science Fiction: Second Edition 2006). He has perhaps become better ...
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 ...