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Sunday 15 March 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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Wiesner, David
(1956- ) US illustrator and graphic artist, almost all of his work being designed for young audiences; he has received much esteem and several awards for this work, most of which falls outside the remit of this encyclopedia and is not listed below. He is of strong if indirect sf interest for Sector 7 (graph 1999), a wordless tale whose young protagonist is taken by an animate cloud from the top of the Empire State Building (see ...
Marshak, Sondra
(1942- ) US author who was associated with Star Trek from the early 1970s into the 1980s, moving from fan activities into Star Trek Ties and commentaries (see Star Trek). Marshak began with Star Trek Lives! (1975) with Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Joan Winston, moving on to Star Trek: The New Voyages (anth 1976) ...
Mearson, Lyon
(1888-1966) Canadian-born art critic, screenwriter and author, in the US for many years, active in the Pulp magazines from about 1915; he wrote the script for Vengeance of the Dead (1917), an early film by Henry King (1886-1982). He is of sf interest for Phantom Fingers (1927), in which a Mad Scientist who commits apparently impossible crimes with the aid of ...
Geissler, Ludwig A
(? -? ) US author, not to be confused with the American writer Ludwig S Geissler, or with several Germans with the same name; his Looking Beyond: A Sequel to "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy, and an Answer to "Looking Forward" by Richard Michaelis (1891), is a Sequel by Other Hands which, with some ingenuity, treats the return to 1888 of Julian West, Edward Bellamy's ...
Snow, C P
(1905-1980) UK scientific administrator or boffin and author, best known for the long Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels, several of which deal intimately with science and the scientific establishment, though even The Search (1958) stays demurely within the bounds of the possible. In Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), nonfiction, he famously suggested that science and the humanities had indeed become "two cultures", a phrase which has ...
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 ...