SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 12 August 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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Rushdie, Salman
(1947- ) Indian-born author, in the UK (and elsewhere) from adolescence, and long a UK citizen. His fame derives not solely from the illegal fatwa, or death "sentence", proclaimed against him by the Islamic theocracy of Iran for The Satanic Verses (1988), which caused his near-death in 2022; but also, and far more importantly, from all his previous work, beginning with the complex and witty, legend-like Grimus (1975), a ...
Henry, W O
(1858-1932) US gynaecologist, surgeon and author whose Equitania: Or, the Land of Equity (1914) is a minor but pleasingly put Utopia in the mode of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), set on a Pacific Island originally colonized by Europeans, Asians and Americans looking for a better life. [JC]
Gillette, King Camp
(1855-1932) US salesman and industrialist who partially invented and wholly made practicable the disposal safety razor, founding the company that now bears his name in 1901; his works as an author, sometimes as by King C Gillette, were universally focused on Utopian solutions to the dilemmas he saw infecting the rapidly expanding capitalist world, beginning with The Human Drift (1894), which advocates a socialist, pollution-free, non-competition-based ...
Fahy, Christopher
(1937-2024) US author whose first works – like The Compost Heap (1970) – convey in mundane contexts a quiet enragedness that may initially seem scattershot. After his first story with genre content, "Carnival" in Gallery for August 1980 – assembled with much of his short fiction of fantastic interest in Matinee at the Flame (coll 2006) – most of his later work of interest is Horror, though ...
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 ...