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Saturday 11 April 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.
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Quanta
US digital magazine produced by Daniel Appelquist, originally while he was at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, but which he continued to maintain over the next six years. It was the first digital sf magazine, with 22 issues from October 1989 to July 1995, initially as an E-Zine distributed to 127 subscribers, eventually becoming an Online Magazine via Compuserve in March 1992 and then as a Webzine ...
Myrus, Don
(1927-2016) US editor, a staff member at Omni. He co-edited the first four Omni anthologies with Ben Bova, then editor of that magazine, beginning with The Best of Omni Science Fiction (anth 1980) and continuing the series as sole editor for two further volumes. [RR]
Games and Sports
This entry deals with games and sports as a theme within sf. Games based on sf are treated under a wide variety of headwords branching out from the Games entry. / Just as sf's concern with the Arts has been dominated by stories about the decline of artistry in a mechanized mass society, so its concern with sports has been much involved with representing the decline of sportsmanship. There was a marked tendency, in sf from the second half ...
Harrison, William
(1933-2013) US academic, poet, screenwriter and author whose Roller Ball Murder (coll 1974; vt Rollerball: 13 Selected Stories 1975) contains the story "Roller Ball Murder" (September 1973 Esquire), which formed the basis for his screenplay for Rollerball (1975), in which the eponymous sport (see Games and Sports) serves as a safety valve to keep the world of 2018 otherwise at peace. ...
Kelly, Florence Finch
(1858-1939) US journalist, suffragist and author, noted for her early Feminist articles, mostly published from around 1895. She is of some sf interest for the Doppelganger tale, The Fate of Felix Brand (1913), clearly meant to evoke Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), though in this case it is the face-forward "Jekyll", here ...
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 ...