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Monday 9 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Monkey Shines
Film (1988; vt Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Terror). Orion/Charles Evans. Directed by George Romero. Written by Romero, based on Monkey Shines (1983) by Michael Stewart. Cast includes Jason Beghe, Kate McNeil, John Pankow and Joyce Van Patten. 113 minutes. Colour. / The sf element in this horror thriller is Ella, a monkey, the subject of an experiment to increase simian intelligence by ...
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 ...
Kirst, Hans Hellmut
(1914-1989) German author best known for nonfantastic novels about World War Two. His Near-Future sf novel, Keiner Kommt Davon (1957; trans Richard Graves as No One Will Escape 1959; vt The Seventh Day 1959), deals with the period directly preceding World War Three and with the atomic Holocaust that then kills off the cast, ...
Charyn, Jerome
(1937- ) US author who was born and educated in New York, which city he gradually transformed in his fiction into a Magic-Realist venue whose mythopoeic resonances and exorbitant happenings hover (see Equipoise) at the edge of generic displacements (and beyond), and strongly prefigure the fabulated New York of writers like John Crowley, Mark ...
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 ...