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Friday 12 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 11 December 2025
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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 ...
Cold Equations, The
Made-for-tv film (1996). USA Pictures/Alliance Communications Corporation/Chanticleer Films. Produced by Yoram Barzilai and Jana Sue Memel. Directed by Peter Geiger. Written by Stephen Berger, Geiger and Norman Plotkin, based on "The Cold Equations" (August 1954 Astounding) by Tom Godwin. Cast includes Billy Campbell (as Bill Campbell), Poppy Montgomery and William R Moses. 92 minutes. Colour. / Sometime in the future, ...
Genone, Hudor
Pseudonym of US soldier, businessman and author William James Roe (1843-1921) for his sf and fantasy; he also produced some non-fantastic work under his own name and under other pseudonyms, including G I Cervus and Viroe. He was a freethinker – a disposition of mind found with surprising infrequency among nineteenth-century sf writers – and in an sf Satire, Inquirendo Island (1886), he dramatized in unmistakable terms his negative feelings ...
Richter, Eugen
(1838-1906) German politician and author, who opposed nineteenth century German antisemitism with vigour and eloquence, and as a liberal opposed the government of Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898). Of sf interest is Sozialdemokratische Zukunftsbilder: frei nach Bebel (1891; trans Henry Wright as Pictures of the Socialistic Future (Freely Adapted from Bebel);vt ...
Kip, Leonard
(1826-1906) US lawyer and author, much of whose work reflects his experiences in the California Gold Rush of 1849; though some of his novels contain trace elements of the supernatural, he is of interest here mainly for Hannibal's Man (1873 chap), a Sleeper Awakes tale in which a truculent Carthaginian is aroused from a glacier, which is included in Hannibal's Man and other Tales: The Argus Christmas Stories (coll 1878). Along with ...
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 ...