SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 February 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Alley Oop
US Comic strip, created and drawn by V T Hamlin from 5 December 1932 for Bonnet-Brown, a small firm which soon collapsed, then from 1933 for the NEA syndicate; Hamlin retired from the daily strip in 1968 and from the Sunday strip in 1973, when it was taken over by his assistant Dave Graue (1926-2001). Drawn in a style more comically exaggerated than usual in adventure strips, though with clear affection, Oop is a tough and likeable ...
Aymé, Marcel
(1902-1967) French author and dramatist, not generally thought of as a contributor to the sf field, though several of his best-known novels, such as La jument verte (1933; appalling anonymous trans as The Green Mare 1938; new trans Norman Denny 1955), are fantasies, usually with a satirical point to make about provincial French life. La belle image (1941; trans Norman Denny as The Second Face 1951; new trans Sophie Lewis ...
Yacht
Also known as YΔCHT. American electropop band, founded by Jona Bechtolt (1980- ). The group is more fully integrated into digital culture than many – initially created for an "art and technology platform" entitled "Crap-tops versus Laptops" organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art, Yacht add Powerpoint presentations, software piracy and integrated blogging and vlogging to the usual recording-and-touring business of being in a band. Their fourth album, ...
Balsdon, Dacre
(1901-1977) academic, historian and author, who signed his nonfiction as J P V D Balsdon, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford 1927-1969; his sf novels are humorous Satires on contemporary mores, little allowance being made for technological, social or behavioural change. The most imaginative, Sell England? (1936), is a Dystopia set 1000 years hence in which the UK is inhabited solely by a decadent aristocracy, while the other ...
Frontiere, Dominic
(1931-2017) US composer and musician, a child prodigy who had studied several instruments by the age of four and played a solo arrangement in Carnegie Hall when twelve. He arranged the music for numerous films beginning with Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956); he is best remembered for his highly innovative theme and incidental music for the first season of the classic US Television series The Outer Limits ...
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 ...