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Tuesday 9 December 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 8 December 2025
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Schenck, Hilbert
(1926-2013) US engineer, university lecturer and author who published his first sf story, "Tomorrow's Weather" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for April 1953, long before he became seriously (though briefly) involved in fiction; much of his nonfiction of the 1950s and 1960s dealt lovingly with the ocean and with oceanological research and exploration technologies. His first two novels are both set in the ocean-girt Cape Cod region of New England, ...
Outcast
Videogame (1999). Appeal. Platforms: Win. / Outcast is a three-dimensional action Adventure game normally played in a third person view, which is notable for the ethereal, otherworldly beauty of its visuals. The game begins after a probe sent to a Parallel World has malfunctioned, creating a hole in space which threatens to destroy the Earth within weeks. The player adopts the role ...
Johnson, Charles
Almost certainly the joint pseudonym of Gena Metcalf (? - ) and Tom Metcalf (? - ), most of whose work has been nonfiction for Young Adult readers. Of sf interest is Pieces of Eight (1989), whose young protagonists travel by Timeslip to the world of the pirate Blackbeard, where they have adventures; this title was announced as beginning the ...
Churchill, Winston S
(1874-1965) UK politician and author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953; influential advocate of legalized Eugenics programmes, such as he (with others) expounded in the Mental Deficiency Act of 1912, with "deficiency" being defined in both medical and moral terms. His only novel, Savrola: A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania (May-December 1899 Macmillan's Magazine; 1900), is a ...
Zola, Émile
(1840-1902) French author whose long and intense Rougon-Macquart sequence of Naturalist novels (1871-1893) includes tales like Nana (1880; trans E A Vizetelly 1884), for which he was once notorious. Zola is of sf interest for Vérité (1903 2vols; trans E A Vizetelly as Truth 1903), the third instalment of his unfinished Les Quatre Évangiles ["The Four Evangelists"] quartet, which was planned to espouse a kind of ...
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 ...