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Friday 16 October 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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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Kamishibai
["Paper Theatre"] Although there has been a scroll-based story-telling tradition in Japan since the 12th century, for our purposes the kamishibai medium was a spin-off that flourished between the 1920s and the 1950s, spanning the Depression era, the peak of Japanese Imperialism, and the American postwar Occupation. / A kamishibai was a frame mounted on the back of a bicycle, coincidentally equivalent in dimensions to a ...
Round Robin
Round-robin stories, in which multiple authors take turns to write sections or chapters of a continuous narrative, generally tend to be games played for the writers' own amusement rather than serious fictional enterprises. Such playful collaborations date back to the nineteenth century. One non-sf instance which had some modest commercial success was the very British mystery novel The Floating Admiral (1931) by "Certain Members of the Detection Club"; there were thirteen ...
See, Carolyn
(1934-2016) US academic, critic and author, most of whose fiction was nonfantastic and most of which, including her two sf novels, is set in Los Angeles (see California). Golden Days (1986), which shifts into the Near Future only in its closing chapters, portrays the doomed private lives of a range of characters as crises, seemingly beyond their ken, escalate into World War Three. ...
Emshwiller, Ed
Working name of US illustrator and film-maker Edmund Alexander Emshwiller (1925-1990), who frequently signed his sf artwork "Emsh", with some early-1950s interior illustrations being signed "Willer"; married from 1949 until his death to writer Carol Emshwiller, who regularly served as his model for paintings of beautiful women. He studied art at the University of Michigan, the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and the Art Students League in New York. ...
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 ...