SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 6 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 2 November 2026
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Blanche, John
(1948-2026) UK artist who began to publish work of genre interest with an illustration in The Flights of Icarus (graph 1977) edited by Martyn Dean and Roger Dean. He soon became strongly associated with Games Workshop enterprises, contributing to White Dwarf with a cover for the June/July 1978 issue (the magazine's first full-colour cover) and later creating cover and other artwork ...
Douglas, Stuart
(? - ) UK author, editor and publisher who began to publish work of genre interest with "No Place Like Home" in the unofficial Doctor Who-related Original Anthology Shelf Life (anth 2008) edited by Julian Eales, David A McIntee and Adrian Middleton. In 2008 he founded the Edinburgh-based Obverse Books ...
Jacobi, Carl
(1908-1997) US author; also editor of several journals, including the Minnesota Quarterly, who began publishing work of genre interest with "Mive" in The Minnesota Quarterly for Fall 1928. His insinuatingly evocative short fiction is mainly of horror and fantasy interest, much of it appearing in Weird Tales, though he also produced some sf, mostly Space Opera, and some of his stories invoke enough arcane ...
Starta, Gary
(? - ) US journalist and author whose novels tend to emplace cross-over elements, short of Equipoisal thrust, into noirish environments, some of these titles being gathered into the Caitlin Diggs series. Of most sf interest are What Are You Made Of (2005); Alzabreah's Island (2008), which provides an Island setting for ...
Champions
Role Playing Game (1981). Hero Games (HG). Designed by George MacDonald, Steve Peterson. / The first edition of Champions popularized the use of a point-based method for character creation, an idea previously seen in Superhero 2044 (1977) and The Fantasy Trip (1977-1980 Metagaming Concepts) designed by Steve Jackson. All characters begin the game ...
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 ...