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Sunday 15 March 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 March 2026
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Straub, Peter
(1943-2022) US author who focused throughout his long career on horror novels, most of them ambitious, and almost always fantastic (see Fantastika; Horror in SF), but using very few sf agencies at any point. His collaboration with Stephen King in the Talisman sequence comprising The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001) verges on sf, however, when its characters ...
Hall, Ronald
(1929- ) UK author in whose sf novel, The Open Cage (1970), an escaped convict returns to a violently altered world hysterically close to Holocaust. [JC]
Costello, Jamie
Pseudonym of UK author Laura Wilson (1964- ), who under her own name has published nonfiction as well as the nonfantastic DI Stratton historical thriller series, set in 1950s London [the sequence is not listed below]. Costello is of sf interest for the Young Adult novel Monochrome (2022), set in a Near Future Dystopian world afflicted by industrial ...
Courtney, S
(? - ) Zimbabwean author whose play, Fallout (performed 19897; 1990 chap), portrays a Zimbabwean family initially indifferent but quickly coming to an awareness that the Near Future outbreak of World War Three, starting on the Russian-Chinese border, has ended civilization. As the play ends in the clutches of Nuclear Winter, radiation ...
Housman, Laurence
(1865-1959) UK playwright and author, brother of Clemence Housman, whose The Were-Wolf (1896) he illustrated [for differently focused entries on both Housman and his sister, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], and of the poet A E Housman (1859-1936). During his life Housman was best known for his plays and for several volumes of fantasy and sf stories, including ...
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 ...