SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 6 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Cummings, M A
Working name of Mona A Cummings (1914-1999), US author of romances as Monette Cummings, and of short stories in various genres, her work of genre interest beginning with "The Brides of Ool" in Planet Stories in 1955. Her collection is Exile and Other Tales of Fantasy (coll 1968), which contains some Planetary Romances. [JC]
Banks, Michael A
Pseudonym of US author and editor Alan Gould (1951-2023), long active in Cincinnati Fandom, who began publishing sf as Banks with "Lost & Found" with George Wagner in Asimov's for March/April 1978, and who has since published at least forty-five stories, some as Alan Gould. His first books of sf interest were the nonfiction Understanding Science Fiction (1982), a primer with examples – mostly his own stories – ...
Orwell, George
Pseudonym of Indian-born UK author Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), briefly but intensely in the early 1940s the partner of Inez Holden; much of his best work was contained in his impassioned journalism and essays, assembled in the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (each coll 1968). His fiction and extended social criticism, as in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), also demonstrates his ...
Whitaker, David
(1928-1980) UK Television scriptwriter and editor who as the first story editor of Doctor Who oversaw the writing of this series' first 51 episodes (1963-1964) and contributed several scripts of his own in the mid- to late 1960s. Whitaker wrote the first Doctor Who novelization, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964; vt Doctor Who and the Daleks 1973). This well-crafted ...
Wolff, Veronica
(? - ) US author of some sf interest for her Highlands sequence of romantic Time Travel tales beginning with Master of the Highlands (2008), whose jaded twentieth-century protagonist discovers a fuller life when she solves the secret of a mysterious Labyrinth which conveys her to the seventeenth century, her true love, and numerous tempests of the spirit and the flesh. ...
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 ...