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Sunday 15 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Darvill, Michael
(1937- ) UK painter, architect and author whose book-length narrative poem, Blessings from a Nuclear War (1987), carries with some metaphysical flourishing a figure named Adam (see Adam and Eve; Clichés) through the history of Homo sapiens on the planet, into the Near Future and an indistinctly described ...
Fane, Julian
(1927-2009) UK author of literary bent whose Dystopia, Revolution Island (1979), was one of the last UK visions of a union-dominated left-wing future. It was published just before the incoming administration of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) put an end, for the century of its publication, to the local relevance of this category of the dreadful warning. [JC]
Bond, Sandra
(1969- ) UK author, fan and poet active in Fandom since the late 1980s, initially producing Fanzines as Harry Bond and later becoming an assiduous scholar of fan history. She began to publish work of professional genre interest with "Electric Midnight" in Pioneers & Pathfinders (anth 2019) edited by Jessica Augustsson. Her first novel was The Psychopath Club (2021), a dark comedy whose ...
Bade, William L
(1928-2005) US academic, physicist (he did work for NASA) and author, who began publishing Hard SF with "Advent" in Astounding for January 1948, beginning the short Advent series of five tales ending with "The Eight Hundredth Hundred-Day" (Fall 1953 Fantastic Worlds). Besides this sequence he wrote three other stories, none remarkable. [JC]
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 ...