SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 November 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 11 November 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Davidson, Steve
(1958-2026) US fan (active with letters published in SF Magazines as early as 1978), editor and publisher. In 2012 he acquired the then-moribund Amazing Stories (which see), reviving it first as a lively website with a news and reviews blog, then with ebook and webzine issues, and – with help from Kickstarter funding – as a print magazine from August 2018 (#614 dated Fall 2018) to Summer 2020 (#619) with Ira ...
Thompson, E P
(1924-1993) UK historian and author, father of Kate Thompson; his highly articulate Marxist interpretation of the last centuries of UK history is best expressed in The Making of the English Working Class (1963). His studies of William Morris – William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) and The Communism of William Morris (1965 chap) – are of sf interest; his only ...
Emanuel, Walter
(1869-1915) UK solicitor and author mostly active around the turn of the century in the short-lived English humour magazine, The Butterfly, the first of whose Dog books was A Dog Day or The Angel in the House (1902), a diary kept by a dog. Of some sf interest is One Hundred Years Hence: Being Some Extracts from the Hourly Mail of A.D. 2000 (1911 chap), which comprises a spoof newspaper by means of which mild aspersions are cast on ...
Operator #5
US Pulp magazine, 48 issues, April 1934 to November/December 1939, published by Popular Publications; edited by Rogers Terrill, originally monthly and then alternated between bimonthly and monthly. This was one of the livelier and more successful hero/villain pulps, thematically more ambitious than most, as it changed after the first twenty issues into a set of Future War narratives garishly prefiguring ...
Super-Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine, 18 bimonthly issues December 1956 to October 1959, published by Headline Publications, New York, edited by W W Scott. Super-Science Fiction was a case of simply one magazine too many, coming in the final wave of interest in sf magazines at the end of the 1950s at a time when readers were already turning to the paperback. Scott, who had no experience in science fiction though he was an old-time Pulp magazine ...
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 ...