SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 19 February 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 18 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Burroughs, John Coleman
(1913-1979) US illustrator and author, the younger son of Edgar Rice Burroughs and actively involved in his father's productions. He illustrated thirteen of Burroughs's titles, wrote a Big Little Book, John Carter of Mars (graph 1940), and subsequently drew the weekly newspaper Comic strip John Carter of Mars from December 1941 to its termination in 1943. This strip ...
Hoch, Edward D
(1930-2008) US author best known for his crime novels and stories; his first story, "Village of the Dead" in Famous Detective Stories for December 1955, introduces Simon Ark, an Occult Detective [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest. Some of these stories are collected in The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (coll 1971), ...
Labatut, Benjamin
(1980- ) Netherlands-born author, most of whose life has been led in Latin America, currently Chile; his work, mostly speculative texts where an interlacing of fiction and nonfiction approaches to the fate of the world, may at times rhetorically evoke Futures Studies, though for the most part his incipits are nonfantastic. Some of the stories assembled in his first book, ...
Asimov, Isaac
(1920-1992) Russian-born US author, the original form of whose name was Isaak Iudich Azimov, but who was brought to America with his family in 1923, and became a US citizen in 1928; his second marriage, in 1973, was to fellow writer J O Jeppson (who later signed herself Janet Asimov). He discovered sf through the magazines sold in his father's candy store, though his first precocious publication, Little Brothers (Spring 1934 Boys High Recorder; ...
Cavelos, Jeanne
(1960- ) US mathematician, author, editor and teacher, who in the latter capacity created and has run the Odyssey writing workshop at various New England campuses since 1996. In her editorial career at Bantam Doubleday Dell, she created the Abyss list which specialized in Horror in SF. Her fiction has primarily been restricted to a series of Babylon 5 Ties, beginning with ...
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 ...