SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Death Ray, The
Russian silent film (1925; original title Luch Smerti). Goskino, Directed by Lev Kuleshov. Written by Vsevolod Pudovkin. Cast includes Vladimir Fogel, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Sergei Komarov, Leonid Obolensky, Porfiri Podobed, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Anya Stravinskaya. 125 minutes (but some of the film is missing, most notably the ending). Black and white. / Somewhere in the West a rebellion by factory workers has been crushed, with many killed. Then we ...
Grainer, Ron
(1922-1981) Australian-born composer and musician, resident in the UK from the 1950s. Grainer's most enduring work is the theme to the BBC TV series Doctor Who (1963-current), created in collaboration with Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. He also composed the themes for the television shows The Prisoner (1967-1968) and ...
Nelson, Frederick
(? - ) Canadian author who is of some sf interest for his Near Future novella Toronto in 1928 AD (1908 chap), in which a mildly fictionalized narrative illustrates how progress – signalled by Transportation advances and the explosive growth of suburbs – has transformed the titular City (see ...
Snodgrass, Melinda M
(1951- ) US lawyer, television screenwriter and author who was strongly associated with Star Trek in her early career, her first novel being Star Trek: The Tears of the Singers (1984); she also served as Executive Script Consultant for the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Of greater sf interest is the Circuit Trilogy – Circuit (1986), ...
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 ...