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Thursday 19 June 2025
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 16 June 2025
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Nizet, Marie
(1859-1922) Belgian author whose only novel, Le Capitaine Vampire (1879; trans Brian Stableford as Captain Vampire 2007), is a Vampire story set in Rumania and in some aspects prefiguring Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The tale cycles through its crepuscular world in a manner reminiscent of Jan Potocki's ...
Top-Notch Comics
US Comic (1939-1942). 27 issues (#1-#27). M.L.J. Magazines Inc.. Artists include Al Camy, Warren King, Ed Smalle and Lin Streeter. Scriptwriters include Jack and Otto Binder (see Eando Binder), Joe Blair, Bob Montana and Harry Shorten. 68 pages. Usually 9 long strips, early issues also had a short text story; plus occasional short strips and non-fiction pieces as filler. Became Top-Notch Laugh Comics (1942-1944), 18 issues (#28-#45), discussed below. / ...
Pier, Garrett Chatfield
(1875-1943) UK-born US author of Hanit the Enchantress (1921), in which a Yale expedition to Egypt discovers what seems to be a Lost World, into the heart of which the lead of the expedition plunges by Timeslip, where he falls in love with the spitting image of the twentieth century woman to whom he is betrothed. [JC]
LaHaye, Tim
(1926-2016) US evangelical minister, "prophecy scholar" and author with Jerry B Jenkins of the thirteen-book Left Behind sequence which depicts the Holocaust that ravages the world in terms of fundamentalist beliefs in the Rapture which precedes/accompanies the Second Coming of Christ. The series is not normally (or properly) read as sf, as the Godgame implications of the story arc take it far beyond ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...