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Sunday 19 July 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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Spinrad, Norman
(1940- ) US author, born in New York – where he set some impressive fiction – but resident in France for many years; married to N Lee Wood (1990-2005). He began publishing sf with "The Last of the Romany" in Analog for 1963, assembled with other early work as The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (coll 1970), the title story being among the most successful of the attempts made by various ...
Scanlon, Mitchel
(? - ) Welsh author who has focused mainly on Ties, initially and primarily for the Warhammer Wargame universe, beginning with "Red Reward" in Inferno for July-August 2003, a Warhammer 40,000 tale; his contribution to the Horus Heresy sub-sequence, Descent of Angels (2007), interestingly focuses on the eponymous colony planet after a ...
Speller, Maureen Kincaid
Working name of UK editor and critic Maureen Speller (1959-2022) who also wrote as Speller, and as Maureen Porter and Maureen Speller Kincaid; partner of Paul Kincaid from 1986 until her death (they married in 1993). Initially as Maureen Porter, she was active since about 1980 in UK Fandom and as a reviewer and essayist, her work appearing widely in various journals including ...
Cornett, Robert
(1952-2022) US author who saw military service and also worked inter alia as paramedic, firefighter, postal worker, private investigator, and academic. He began to publish work of genre interest with Remember the Alamo? (1980; vt Remember the Alamo! 1986) as Robert Charles Cornett in collaboration with Kevin D Randle, opening the Time Mercenaries sequence of Military SF involving ...
Stars
The stars have always exerted a powerful imaginative fascination upon the human mind. When they were thought to be mere points of light in the panoply of heaven, it was believed by astrologers that the secrets of the future were written there, and various cultures wove their Mythology into the patterns of various constellations. Not until 1718 did Edmond Halley (1656-1742) demonstrate that the stars were not "fixed", and not until the late 1830s were the distances ...
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 ...