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Monday 9 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Benson, E F
(1867-1940) UK author, brother of A C Benson and Robert Hugh Benson, and by far the most prolific of the three as far as fiction is concerned, with dozens of attractive, realistic novels and romances to his credit, and a number of novels involving the supernatural. The most telling of these is perhaps his first in this mode, The Judgment Books (1895), which shows the influence of Oscar ...
Burdekin, Katharine
(1896-1963) UK author, who was working in a military hospital during World War One when her husband was wounded in action; she signed some of her work Kay Burdekin in America and, in the 1930s, wrote what remains her best-known novel as by Murray Constantine, a pseudonym which was confirmed only in 1985 by Professor Daphne Patai. Neither of her first two novels explores the fantastic. Her third, The Burning Ring (1927), however, is a ...
Lewis, Gwyneth
(1959- ) Welsh poet, active from the mid-1970s; she publishes in both Welsh and English. She is of sf interest for two narrative poems. Zero Gravity (1998) Equipoises two versions of significant journey: an astronaut's involvement in the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope; and an array of internal odysseys, at least one of them deathwards. More complexly, the Fantastic Voyage undertaken in ...
Blue Thunder
Film (1983). Rastar/Gordon Carroll Productions. Directed John Badham. Written by Dan O'Bannon, Don Jakoby. Cast includes Candy Clark, Malcolm McDowell, Warren Oates, Roy Scheider and Daniel Stern. 110 minutes. Colour. / Borderline sf set in a very Near-Future Los Angeles, Blue Thunder tells the story of Murphy (Scheider), a helicopter-based police officer, asked to try out a new supercopter: it can see through ...
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 ...