SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 2025
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 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Lovelock, James
(1919-2022) UK environmentalist, biologist and author whose proposal of the Gaia (which see) hypothesis in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979; rev 2000) has had considerable influence on sf and the old concept of Living Worlds. He credited William Golding for suggesting in the late 1960s that his then evolving hypothesis be named after the Greek earth-goddess Gaia. His ...
Famous Fantastic Mysteries
US Pulp magazine which published 81 issues, September/October 1939 to June 1953. It was monthly after the first issue, but bimonthly from May/June 1940. Its popularity was such that it returned to a monthly schedule in June 1942, after it had combined with its short-lived companion Fantastic Novels, but during the World War Two years publication was quarterly and sometimes irregular. It returned to a bimonthly schedule in December ...
Donald, Matthew
(? - ) US author whose Megazoic sequence beginning with Megazoic (2017) combines Planetary Romance, Young Adult shenanigans and Space Opera, with dinosaurs as protagonists. Of perhaps greater interest is Teslanauts (2022), a Young Adult tale set in a ...
Frey, James N
(1943- ) US creative writing teacher (he has published manuals in that field) and author, not to be confused with Mark Washburn, one of whose novels, The Armageddon Game: A Novel of Suspense (1977), shares its main title with Frey's The Armageddon Game (1985) as J N Frey; only Washburn's tale verges on the fantastic. The Elixir (1986) is a Gothic-SF/fantasy story of ...
Red Band Comics
Mexican/US Comic (1944-1945). #1-#3 Publicaciones Recreativas (Mexico), #4 Lindsay L. Baird Inc. (USA). Four issues (but see below). Artists include Bernard Baily and August Froehlich. Scriptwriters include Bruce Elliott. 52 pages per issue, comprising five long strips and a short text story, plus some brief filler material. Though there were four issues, numbered #1-#4 (and with different dates), #2 has the same content and cover art as ...
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 ...