SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 8 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 3 February 2025
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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Michaelis, Richard C
(1839-1909) German-born author in America for many years, whose Looking Further Forward: An Answer to Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (1890; vt A Sequel to Looking Backward; Or, Looking Further Forward 1891) is a Sequel by Other Hands to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) that mocks the socialist society presented in the original as a ...
Science Fiction Book Club
We use the term book club in its older sense, that of a subscription-based relationship between purchasers – who normally agree to buy a certain number of titles a year – and the organization which publishes or distributes these titles, usually at a very significant discount from the retail price in bookshops. More recently the term has been applied to a discussion club, usually informal, where a group of people gather regularly to discuss a previously decided book. This sense of ...
Libraries
Libraries inevitably feature from time to time in Genre SF and other Fantastika, as repositories of knowledge and power-houses of Education in SF. A famous mathematical Thought Experiment is the unthinkably vast yet provably finite Total Library containing all book-length permutations of letters and numerals, and thus all possible books. This was proposed by ...
Finlay, Roger T
(? -? ) US author – possibly a pseudonym used for this sequence – known today only for the Wonder Island Boys series of adventures for the Young Adult market, featuring the exploits of its young castaway protagonists, who discover in the final volume of the series, The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Islands (1915), that the natives of the Archipelago which ...
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 ...