SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 September 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 7 September 2026
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Mad
US Magazine (1952-current) initially published by EC Comics, which debuted as a full-colour Comic book before shifting to a black-and-white magazine format in 1955 so that publisher William Gaines could evade the oversight of the newly created Comics Code Authority. It has always specialized in good-natured Satire aimed at a wide variety of targets. Since 2018 its publication has ...
Online Worlds
Any game involving more than one person is played in a kind of Shared World, even if that world only exists until one of the participants has won. Such places gained a greater degree of permanence in Role Playing Games, where the Gamemaster might create an episodic campaign taking years to complete, and in the Play by Mail industry, in which the moderator ...
Seed, David
(1946- ) UK academic and critic who has concentrated on the teaching of sf for many years (see SF in the Classroom); his books divide more or less equally between individual studies and strongly edited anthologies. His first work of genre interest is The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (1988), a general study issued before Thomas Pynchon began to publish much more frequently ...
Cockcroft, T G L
(1926-2013) New Zealand fan and bibliographer, in employment with IBM from the pre-electronic punched-card era. In spite of his relative isolation in New Zealand, he was a regular Fanzine contributor and corresponded with Fandom worldwide from an early age. He had letters published in Amazing Stories in the mid-1940s, but his main contributions to the genre were detailed bibliographies, in particular ...
Hardart, F E
(1913-1992) US teacher, mechanical engineer and author, who published at least one item as Flossie Hardart during her short writing career. Her name has sometimes been given in error as Frank E Hardart. One of a relatively small number of female fans before World War Two (see Fandom; History of SF), she began to publish work of genre interest with "The Devil's Pocket" in Astonishing Stories ...
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 ...