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Monday 5 October 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 5 October 2026
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Pollard, Capt A O
(1893-1960) UK soldier and author, not simultaneously. In active combat throughout World War One, he was repeatedly honoured, and in 1917 was awarded the Victoria Cross; active from 1930. His war memoir, Fire-Eater: The Memoirs of a VC (1932), has been likened, because of its almost surreal buoyancy in the face of apocalypse, to the work of Ernst Jünger, though it lacks any philosophical ambition. In his ...
Deadly Bees, The
Film (1967). Amicus Productions. Directed by Freddie Francis. Produced by Max J Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky. Written by Robert Bloch and Anthony Marriott, loosely (see below) based on A Taste for Honey (1941; vt A Taste for Murder 1955) by Gerald Heard, credited as H F Heard. Cast includes Guy Doleman, Catherine Finn, Frank Finlay and Suzanna Leigh. 83 minutes. Colour. / An unnamed London ...
Vernon, Leah
(? - ) US "social media influencer" and author perhaps best known for her nonfiction Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim (2019). Her Union sequence beginning with The Impure (2016; rev vt The Union 2022) can be understood as a Thought Experiment depicting a Dystopian distant-Near Future America ...
Oramus, Marek
(1952- ) Polish engineer, journalist, critic and author whose pseudonyms include Ewaryst Gwizdek, Jan Buła, Kunktator and Predator. / As a critic and essayist, Oramus has been highly prolific. From the 1970s he worked as a journalist, often penning Fantastika book reviews. From 1990 he headed the critical section of the leading Polish genre monthly Fantastyka (later ...
Fendall, Percy
(1850-1917) French-born playwright author, raised in Australia but in the UK by early manhood; in his Near Future sf Satire, Lady Ermyntrude and the Plumber: A Love Tale of MCMXX (1912), the passage of the Great Compulsory Work Act, and the suppression of the House of Lords, creates a society in which everyone must work to live, including the king and queen, who become hotel proprietors. [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 ...