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Sunday 12 April 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 6 April 2026
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Bell, Geo W
(1838-1907) US soldier (though his claim to the rank of Colonel has not been confirmed), real estate speculator, diplomat (Consul for the United States in Sydney, New South Wales, 1894-1900) and author; his sf novel, Mr Oseba's Last Discovery (1904 New Zealand) may have been written as a real estate promotion. The protagonist meets a traveling inhabitant of the Hollow Earth, who has arrived on the surface via the Arctic Symmes Hole (see John ...
Kaiser, Georg
(1878-1945) German playwright whose work – about seventy plays in all – was central to the German Expressionist movement in the theatre from before World War One; he also wrote the text for three operas by Kurt Weill (1900-1950). After the formally unadventurous Die Korale: Schauspiel in Fünf Akten (performed 1917, Munich; 1917; trans Winifred Katzin as The Coral 1963), which comprises ...
Scaevola, Peter
(? - ) US author of '68: A Novel of Presidential Politics (1964), set in Near Future America where a demagogic candidate exploits racism, anti-semitism and a range of fundamentalist Paranoias in his bid to become president. [JC]
Lerman, Rhoda
(1936-2015) US author whose first novel, Call Me Ishtar (1973), is a Satirical fantasy; she is of some sf interest for The Book of the Night (1984), an exercise in Timeslip Fantastika whose protagonist, only sometimes male, can be understood when female as a Temporal Adventuress (see Feminism; ...
Dream World
US Digest-size magazine. Three quarterly issues, February-August 1957; published by Ziff-Davis; edited by Paul W Fairman. Subtitled "Stories of Incredible Powers", Dream World was initiated as a response to the success of the December 1955 and October 1956 issues of Fantastic, both of which ran stories of wish-fulfilment sometimes featuring ...
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 ...