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Saturday 12 July 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 7 July 2025
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Cyrano de Bergerac
The form of his name under which French soldier and author Hector Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) is best known. He fought with the Gascon Guard but retired after sustaining bad wounds. He is famous as the hero of a play by Edmond Rostand (1868-1918), Cyrano de Bergerac (performed 1897; 1898; trans Gladys Thomas and Mary E Guillemard 1898), which made legends of his swordsmanship and the size of his nose. Parts only of his major work of ...
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
Film (1987). Cannon. Directed by Sidney J Furie. Written by Lawrence Kohner, Mark Rosenthal, based on a story by Reeve, Kohner. Cast includes Gene Hackman, Mariel Hemingway, Margot Kidder and Christopher Reeve. 93 minutes. Colour. / Superman's death knell, at the box office anyway, was tolled by Cannon's attempt to get more mileage from his exploits after he had been jettisoned by Alexander and Ilya Salkind. Reeve agreed to play the part again ...
O'Reilly, John
(1906-1981) US journalist and war correspondent who wrote The Glob (18 February 1952 Life Magazine; exp 1952 chap), an explanation of the theory of Evolution and the Origin of Man, couched in fictional form for younger readers as the life-story of the eponymous creature who crawls out of the swamp and becomes, by stages, Homo sapiens. The earlier pages have some distant relationship to ...
Suzuki Izumi
(1949-1986) Japanese author who, at the beginning of her troubled career, quit her teenage job as a key-punch operator after a Fanzine story gained an honourable mention in a competition run by the literary magazine Shōsetsu Gendai. Moving to Tokyo in 1970, she moonlighted as a bar hostess, nude model and actress under the name Naomi Asaka or Naomi Senkō. Her husband, the saxophonist Kaoru Abe, died of a drug overdose in ...
Raman, A Thothathri
(? - ) Indian journalist and author whose sf novel, Hope!: A 26th Century Tale of Commerce and Love (2002), set in a Galactic Empire apparently dominated by Earth, where a rigid Dystopia has banned both commerce and love from the armamentarium of human responses to reality; the protagonists, who hail from a distant colony planet, rebel successfully. [JC]
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 ...