SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 14 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
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Wirkus, Tim
(? - ) US author, with a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of South California, whose Mormon upbringing plays a significant part in their work to date. Wirkus's first novel, City of Brick and Shadow (2014), while non-fantastical, draws on the influence of Jorge Luis Borges for a mystery, never resolved, about two hapless, young Mormon missionaries in Brazil who are drawn into a ...
Ellsworth, Spencer
(? - ) US teacher and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Mount Rainier Considers its Mental Health" in Brain Harvest for 9 December 2009. He is of sf interest primarily for the Starfire sequence beginning with Starfire: A Red Peace (2017) being Space Opera set in a riven Galactic Empire; its protagonist finds an ancient artefact (see ...
Balfour, Andrew
(1873-1931) Scottish medical doctor specializing in tropical medicine, and at around the beginning of the twentieth century author of several adventure novels under the influence of H Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson. Of these, ...
Alan Parsons Project, The
UK prog-rock band founded by Alan Parsons (1948- ) and Eric Woolfson (1945-2009). Parsons worked as a record producer, and remains best-known today as the sound engineer of Pink Floyd's album Dark Side of the Moon (1974); there is, indeed, an inescapably sub-Floyd feel to most of the work released by his own band. Each of the ten Alan Parsons Project albums develops a single "concept", often science-fictional, through a number ...
Red Band Comics
Mexican/US Comic (1944-1945). #1-#3 Publicaciones Recreativas (Mexico), #4 Lindsay L. Baird Inc. (USA). Four issues (but see below). Artists include Bernard Baily and August Froehlich. Scriptwriters include Bruce Elliott. 52 pages per issue, comprising five long strips and a short text story, plus some brief filler material. Though there were four issues, numbered #1-#4 (and with different dates), #2 has the same content and cover art as ...
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 ...