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Saturday 13 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.
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Bridgeman, Amanda
(? - ) Australian author whose Aurora sequence beginning with Darwin (2013 ebook) is set in a moderately distant Near Future galaxy, into which Homo sapiens is edgily expanding. In the first volume, a human force (see Military SF) must explore a mysterious abandoned Space Station, a mission complicated by a passel of new ...
Price, John-Allen
(1954- ) US author of two Near Future thrillers, Extinction Cruise (1987) and The Pursuit of the Phoenix (1990), the latter being set in near space and auguring the start of World War Three; The Apostle of Insanity Trilogy: Mutant Chronicles: Frenzy (1994), part of a series of Ties to a ...
Wise, Susannah
(? - ) UK actor and author, active in the former capacity from the late 1990s. Her first novel, This Fragile Earth (2021), was inspired, according to Wise, by the death of her father the film director Herbert Wise (1924-2015). In Near Future London living conditions continue to worsen as planetary crises (see Climate Change) proliferate; the ...
Niall, Ian
Pseudonym of Scottish author John McNeillie (1916-2002), most famous for the nonfiction The Poacher's Handbook (1950). His sf novel, The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow (1952), offers a quiet portrait of the effect on a small village of a young lad's Predictions of the Near Future. [JC]
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 ...