SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Redd, David
(1946-2024) Welsh author, exclusively of short fiction, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Way to London Town" in New Worlds for July 1966; he was intermittently active in Fandom from 1965. Never prolific, he published some three dozen stories in SF Magazines and Original Anthologies from 1966 to 2018. Two have appeared in translation as by David ...
Stranger Things
US online tv series (2016-current). 21 Laps Entertainment and Monkey Massacre for Netflix. Created by Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer. Written by Paul Dichter, Justin Doble, Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, Jessica Mecklenburg, Jessie Nickson-Lopez and Alison Tatlock. Directed by Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer and Shawn Levy. Cast includes Millie Bobby Brown, Joe Keery, David Harbour, Charlie Heaton, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Matthew Modine, Shannon Purser, Winona Ryder, Noah Schnapp and Finn ...
Sanders, Leonard
Working name of US author Leonard M Sanders Jr (1929-2005) US author who also published as by Dan Thomas, under which name he wrote The Seed (1968), an sf novel in which a Computer explains the meaning of life to one of its engineers. The later Hamlet Group sequence of very Near Future thrillers, comprising The Hamlet Warning (1976) and The Hamlet Ultimatum (1979), following America's ...
Mutants
The idea of "mutation" as a concept for use in understanding biological Evolution was popularized by Hugo de Vries (1848-1935) in Die Mutationstheorie (1901-1903); he related it to gross hereditary variations – the freakish "sports" which occasionally turn up in animal populations. Such sports are usually short-lived and sterile, and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had rejected the notion that they might play a key part; the concept of mutation as an ...
Hurley, Richard J
(? - ) US editor of works mainly aimed at the Young Adult markets. His reprint Anthology Beyond Belief (anth 1966) capably assembles mostly familiar stories by such well-known authors as Isaac Asimov, Clark Ashton Smith and Theodore Sturgeon. [GSt]
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 ...