SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 20 August 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 17 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld (see Flat Earth) resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the ...
Gonzales, Laurence
(1947- ) US author, mostly of nonfiction, including Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (2003). He is of sf interest for Lucy (2010), an Apes as Human tale whose protagonist discovers after he has adopted the child of a dead colleague in Africa that she is the result of a Eugenic experiment in Genetic Engineering, and that she is ...
Fandom
Active readers of sf and fantasy (see Science Fiction) can be called fans. Fans who also maintain contacts with other fans through Fanzines and Conventions can be described as participating in Fandom, a loose affinity group (or, increasingly, a set of groups) whose origins go back to the late 1920s, shortly after the appearance of the first SF Magazines, where from ...
Pougens, Charles
Working name of French philologist, artist and bookseller Marie-Charles-Joseph de Pougens (1755-1833), who also signed as Charles de Pougens; his Jocko: anecdote détachée des Lettres inédites sur l'instinct des animaux ["Jocko: Anecdote Extracted from Unpublished Letters on Animal Instinct"] (1824; trans Georges T Dodds as "Jocko" in The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men, anth 2010) is an early ...
Starlog
US monthly nonfiction magazine about sf (and fantasy) in the media, largely Cinema and Television, founded 1976, print edition ceased 2009; small-Bedsheet, saddle-stapled; publishers included O'Quinn Studios, Starlog Communications, New York, and The Brooklyn Company; editors have included Howard Zimmerman and David McDonnell. / Initially heavily focused on ...
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 ...