SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 17 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
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Bullett, Gerald
(1893-1958) UK broadcaster, poet and author, in active service during World War One, active as an author from 1916 or earlier, and as a broadcaster from April 1926, when he was the first author to read a story of his own composition on the BBC; he also wrote as by Sebastian Fox. Much of his short fiction contains fantasy elements, often with a surreal edge [for details on fantasy stories by Bullett, and for Crosshatch and Faerie below, see The ...
Genetic Engineering
In his remarkable prophetic essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924) J B S Haldane looked forward optimistically to a day when biologists have "invented" a new species of alga to solve the world's food problem, and in which "ectogenetic" children born from artificial wombs can be strategically modified by Eugenic selection. Nothing was known in 1924 about the biochemistry of genetics, so Haldane spoke mainly in ...
Chi Shuchang
(1922-1997) Chinese author and translator from Japanese, remembered today for one work that captured the spirit of the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s. Born in North-East China shortly before it fell under the sway of the Japanese "Manchurian" puppet-state, Chi studied Economics at Keiō University in Japan, before returning to newly Communist China. There, he became one of the early "science popularizers", writing Children's SF ...
Drake, Nick
(1961- ) UK poet (see Poetry), screenwriter, librettist, playwright and author, variously active from the early 1980s; his detective novels, beginning with Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead (2006), are nonfantastic, as is the opera/oratorio Between Worlds (2015) by Tansy Davies (1973- ), a meditation on 9/11 for which he wrote the libretto. Drake is of sf interest for The Farewell Glacier ...
Buckley-Archer, Linda
(1958- ) UK scriptwriter for BBC Radio and Television, and author of the Young Adult Gideon Trilogy beginning with Gideon the Cutpurse (2006), where sf devices – Antigravity and a Time Machine – are utilized in the frame story and throughout, initially to transport its young protagonists ...
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 ...