SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 July 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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Man and the Challenge, The
US tv series (1959-1960). ZIV Television Programmes for NBC-TV. Created by Ivan Tors. Produced by Tors. Associate Producer Andrew Marton. Directors included Richard Carlson, Alan Crosland Jr, Tom Gries, Otto Lang. Writers included Don Brinkley, Carlson, Gene Levitt, Arthur Weiss. Cast includes Jack Ging, Joyce Meadows and George Nader. 36 30-minute episodes. Black and white. / Dr Glen Barton (Nader) is a research Scientist working for the Institute of ...
Loontown
US live-action and animated film (2023). Positronish Productions. Directed by Nir Yaniv. Written by Lavie Tidhar. Cast includes Kenneth Jay, Al Lubel, Digger Mesch, Nathan Osgood, Katie Snyder, Russell Wilcox and Anne Wittman. 18 minutes. Colour. / Jokingly described by its creators as "The Citizen Kane of balloon noir movies" (itself a reference to the Boston Globe's description of Bobcat Goldthwait's ...
Stevenson, David
(? - ) American book designer and artist, sometimes credited as Dave Stevenson and sometimes erroneously credited in references as David or Dave Stephenson. Obtaining biographical information is complicated by the fact that there are other artists with this name, but it is known that this David Stevenson has lived in New York and worked for Random House since the 1990s, and he now serves the company as a Senior Art Director, overseeing books published by ...
Viehl, S L
Pseudonym of US medical technician (specializing in trauma) and author Sheila Lynn Kelly (1961- ), who uses S L Viehl for her sf; she has also published as by Gena Hale, Jessica Hall, Rebecca Kelly and Lynn Viehl. Her sf titles are exclusively set in the StarDoc Universe, whose first subseries, the StarDoc sequence beginning with Stardoc (2000) and ending with Dream Called Time (2010), follows the ...
Elder, Michael
(1931-2004) London-born actor and author in various genres, in Scotland from about 1940, where he featured in at least 1000 radio broadcasts, though he was best known for his television role as the doctor in Take the High Road (1980-2003), a long-running soap opera. The first of his novels, The Affair at Invergarroch (1950), hints at the supernatural as an ancient cathedral is ransacked for treasure; he began writing sf proper with Paradise is Not Enough ...
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 ...