SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 September 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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Potts, F E
(? - ) US pilot and author of PDU-1: A Novella of the Remote Future (2000) in which an encoded entity (see AI) in Cyberspace describes her adventures as an embodied human figure: which may be a digital configuration, or something more. [JC]
Freeling, Nicolas
Working name of UK author born Diamond Arthur Sigurd Partridge (1927-2003) but known for most of his life as Nicolas Davidson (under which name he married) or Nicolas Freeling; long resident in Europe. He is best known for the Van der Valk detective series, featuring Piet Van der Valk, Commissaris in the Amsterdam police; this character appeared in most of Freeling's earlier novels, though not in Gadget (1977), in which an abducted physicist is persuaded by his abductors to ...
Children in SF
In his essay "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" (in Science Fiction at Large ed Peter Nicholls anth 1976; vt Explorations of the Marvellous 1978) Thomas M Disch asserts, tongue only partly in cheek, that sf is a branch of children's literature – because most lovers of the genre begin reading it in their early teens, and because many sf stories are about children. Whether or not ...
Fenn, George Manville
(1831-1909) UK teacher, publisher, editor and author, of whose 170 or more novels and collections, mostly for the Young Adult market, some are of sf interest, including The Golden Magnet: A Tale of the Land of the Incas (1884), a Lost Race tale set in South America; The Man With a Shadow (1888 3vols), in which a Mad Scientist's attempts to generate a state of ...
Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
Film (1969). Produced, directed and written by David Cronenberg as Emergent Films Ltd. Cast includes Iain Ewing, Clara Mayer, Glenn McCauley, Jack Messinger, Arlene Mlodzik, Ronald Mlodzik and Paul Mulholland. 65 minutes. Black and white. / David Cronenberg's first feature-length film, the director's third following the 16mm shorts Transfer (1966) and ...
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 ...