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Friday 12 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Spivey, Thomas Sawyer
(1857-1938) US author of two Lost Race novels: The Seven Sons of Ballyhack (1911) is set specifically before the Biblical Flood, where a number of doomed nations are described Satirically; and The Caverns of Crail (1912), set in a less fixed period, though long before identifiable nations exist, and mainly concerned with dynastic disputes. The Last of the Gnostic Masters (1926), which is ...
Meléndez, Francisco
(1941- ) Spanish illustrator and author, perhaps best known for two Steampunk-inflected fables of Invention, each featuring an obsessed tinkerer. El verdadero inventor del Buque Submarino (1989 chap; trans William Dyckes and adapted Robert Morton as The Mermaid and the Major: The True Story of the Invention of the Submarine 1991), which seems to be set in the eighteenth century, ...
Blaché, Sin
(? - ) US musician and author of fan fiction (see Fandom) under an undisclosed pseudonym, resident in Ireland for some time; for whose first sf publication under their own name, Prophet (2023) with Helen Macdonald, see their co-author for details. [JC]
Gothic SF
In current usage a "Gothic" is a romantic novel with a strong element of the mysterious or the supernatural which usually features the persecution of a woman in an isolated locale; but this restricted and specialized use of the word, and the marketing category associated with it, have little to do with most sf. The term "Gothic" entered the English language as a descriptive term for a particular kind of story with the publication of The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) by ...
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 ...