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Friday 12 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Skolsky, Syd
(1917-1998) US author, mostly on musical subjects; her sf novel, The Affectionism Society: A Love Story in a Futuristic Setting (1977), is a Near Future First Contact tale in which humans and the Alien Vars begin to understand each other through the problematics of Sex. [JC]
Daniels, Karen
(1957- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Life-Giver" for Keen SF in 1997 as by Karen M Daniels, and whose Zaddack Tales sequence – comprising Dancing Suns (2000), Mentor's Lair (2001) and Mindspark (2002) – joins a human female, possibly the sole survivor of her race in this Far Future venue, with an ...
Masciola, Carol
(? - ) US screenwriter, journalist and author in whose first novel, the Young Adult The Yearbook (2015), a young protagonist finds herself, after falling asleep over an old yearbook in her high school Library, shifted by a form of Time Travel or Timeslip into the same town eighty years earlier. Here, after plot ...
Clay, Cynthia Joyce
(1954- ) US author whose Feminist sf tale, Zollocco: A Novel of Another Universe (2000), whose Earth-human protagonist finds herself transported to a world where a Gaia-like principle animates the forest; the argument of the book allows the inference that feminist goals are only to be achieved through a freeing of the spirituality of women. [JC]
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 ...