SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 7 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 3 February 2025
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Levy, David
(1913-2000) US film executive and author in whose The Gods of Foxcroft (1970) the protagonist awakes from Suspended Animation to find the world of 500 years hence suffering under circumstances disastrous to the world's Ecology, forcing humans into cramped habitats; meanwhile, Aliens are observing us from space. [JC]
Murphy, Warren
(1933-2015) US author, married to Molly Cochran, known largely for the Destroyer sequence, a long series of spoof thrillers, many with Richard Ben Sapir, featuring the Doc Savage-like adventures of Remo Williams, a White man (and avatar of Shiva the Destroyer) trained in the paranormal combat arts of Sinanju, which allow him (for instance) to interpenetrate his body with other matter (see ...
Fleming, Roscoe
(1895-1974) US journalist and author who began publishing work of sf interest with "The Menace of the Little" for Amazing Stories Quarterly in Summer 1931, a complex Invasion novella in which Earth defends itself against the Hive-Mind civilization of Mars whose war centre, a hollowed-out mountain in America, is eventually bombed. Fleming seems to have written no ...
Dwyer, James Francis
(1874-1952) Australian author, imprisoned for committing forgery (1899-1902), in the US after 1907, in France after 1921; a prolific author of stories from 1902, sometimes as by Burglar Bill with the Sydney Bulletin, where he began publishing a huge stream of works; he eventually moved on as well to a wide range of magazines like Black Cat, Blue Book and Argosy. "The Phantom ...
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 ...