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Sunday 16 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 10 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 resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Grabiński, Stefan
(1887-1936) Polish author, primarily known outside Poland for his short fiction, almost all of which was written between 1908 and 1922. After the inconsequential self-published Z wyjatków. W pomrokach wiary ["From the Unusual. In the Shadow of Belief"] (coll 1909) as by Stefan Żalny, the best of these stories – most of them horror tales of great intensity and of a sexual explicitness very infrequently found in his English-language ...
Rats
Rats, though sometimes cherished as pets (albeit far less frequently than Cats or Dogs) are traditionally unpopular: disliked as household pests and often feared, sometimes to the extent of outright phobia. They feature in the ultimate Torture of Room 101, tailored to the protagonist's greatest dread, in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Rats and their fleas ...
Ultravox
UK synth-pop band, who as "Ultravox!" (with exclamation mark) released a first eponymous album Ultravox! (1977). A modishly alienated work that uses synthesizers in a doomy and rather melodramatic manner, it nevertheless achieves some atmospheric moments, as in the urban noir of "Saturday Night In The City of the Dead", or the Robot-themed "I Want To Be A Machine". This last song, one of the band's early successes, situates itself in a subordinate ...
America's Greatest Comics
US Comic (1941-1943). Fawcett Publications. 8 issues. Artists include Phil Bard, C. C. Beck, Tom McNamara and Mac Raboy. Script writers include Otto Binder (see Eando Binder) and Tom McNamara. 100 pages, comprising five or six long strips and a short text story, plus short strips (fiction and non-fiction) as filler. / #1 opens with Captain Marvel: when radio reporter Billy Batson says "SHAZAM" ...
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 ...