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Thursday 12 March 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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Kircher, Athanasius
(1602-1680) German Jesuit priest and polymath, author of at least thirty ambitious texts unified by a profound desire to detect and determine and correlate original causes in all phenomena; his influence on later generations has been severely dissipated by his initial, conservative Christian adherence to a geocentric model of the universe (a century after Copernicus), though he changed his mind, and by the fact that – far more than other "sleepwalkers" into ...
Hopkins, Pauline
(1859-1940) US editor, journalist, playwright, actor and author active from around 1880, whose difficult literary career (she was African-American) ended after the publication of her fourth novel, Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self (November 1902-January 1903 The Colored American Magazine; 2004). The protagonist of the tale – a medical student in Boston named Reuel Briggs, passing for white at a time of ferocious prejudice in America – becomes enamoured of a ...
Richards, Harvey D
Pseudonym of US military pilot and author Noël E Sainsbury Jr (1884-1956) for his Sorak sequence, beginning with Sorak of the Malay Jungle [for all subtitles see Checklist] (1934), and clearly intended to exploit the popularity of Tarzan. Sorak himself, and his animal companion (in this case, a tiger), are inherently as borderline-sf in their conception as Tarzan himself; but they venture (as does Tarzan) into sf territory, discovering a ...
Light, Walter H
(1881-1940) UK author of fiction for boys, most active before and during World War One, who also wrote as by Walter Herrod and Wingrove Willson. Kings of the Amazon (26 January-6 April 1929 Boys' Magazine as "The Peril Kings of Amazon Mystery-Land"; 1929 chap) as by Willson, a Lost Race tale, is typical. [JC/RR] see also: Boys' Friend Library; Boys' Papers. / ...
Greenhough, Terry
Working name of UK author Terence Greenhough (1944-2002) for most of his fiction, though he used the pseudonym Andrew Lester for the routine novel The Thrice-Born (1976), about persecuted hermaphrodites on a distant planet. Greenhough began publishing sf with "The Tree in the Forest" for Science Fiction Monthly in 1974. After Friend of Pharaoh (1975), an historical romance, his first sf novel, Time and Timothy Grenville (1975), typically of this ...
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 ...