SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 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 7 July 2025
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Catling, Brian
(1948-2022) UK academic, film maker, sculptor, performance artist, poet and author, active from the 1970s; he served as Professor of fine art at Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, from 1991, emeritus from 2017. Much of his output in the various but interconnected fields to which he contributed may be very roughly understood in terms of Fantastika, as this term is used in this encyclopedia. Very specifically, his first novel, The Vorrh (2012), which ...
Norwood, Victor
(1920-1983) UK traveller and author who concentrated on Westerns and nonfiction works about exploration. Of some genre interest is the Jacaré the Untamed series of South American jungle adventure tales, loosely derived from Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and mostly sf or fantasy: The Untamed (1951), The Caves of Death (1951), The Temple of the Dead ...
Hopkins, Pauline
(1859-1940) US editor, journalist, playwright, actor and author active from around 1880, whose difficult literary career (she was African-American) ended after the publication of her fourth novel, Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self (November 1902-January 1903 The Colored American Magazine; 2004). The protagonist of the tale – a medical student in Boston named Reuel Briggs, passing for white at a time of ferocious prejudice in America – becomes enamoured of a ...
Apostolides, Alex
(1923-2005) US archaeologist, museum curator, journalist and author who began to publish sf with "Progress Report" (July 1953 If) and "Solution Delayed" (July 1953 Astounding), both written with Mark Clifton. He also collaborated with Clifton (whom see for details) on two early stories in the Bossy series and the first story only of Clifton's Ralph Kennedy sequence. Apostolides' one solo story is ...
Hyde, Mark Powell
(1881-1952) US author in whose Young Adult novel, The Strange Inventor: A Curious Adventure Story (1927), Merlin Time Travels incognito to the twentieth century, where he meets the young protagonist, and amazes him with the engineless car (another of his Inventions) in which he carries him away. The two visit the future, where adventures are had, and the past, ditto. Merlin himself is a ...
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 ...