SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 July 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 7 July 2026
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Wolf, Mari
(1926- ) US fan (see Fandom), technician in the rocket industry, and author, married to Rog Phillips 1950-1955; her only novel, The Golden Frame (1961), is nonfantastic. She began publishing work of genre interest with Robots of the World! Arise! (July 1952 If; 2010 ebook); it is not established if her first use of the word Droid, in ...
Spencer, Colin
(1933-2023) UK broadcaster, painter and author, active in the latter capacity from 1955, his short stories and novels almost never edging into the fantastic. Of sf interest is Asylum (1966), a Satire set in very Near Future Britain seen in Absurdist SF terms as exactly an asylum, one in which – in a manner similar to the Theatre of the Absurd – extravagant behaviours are staged, ...
Armour, R Coutts
(1874-1945) Australian author, who wrote popular fiction, mostly for magazines, under his own name and under various pseudonyms, including Coutts Brisbane, Pierre Quiroule (a probable House Name), Hartley Tremayne, Reid Whitley (or Whitly), and other names not yet discovered; his career extended from before World War One until at least the late 1930s in sf and continued into the early 1940s in ...
Yamazaki Haruya
(1938-2002) Japanese author and scenarist who wrote dozens of Anime scripts in the 1970s and 1980s. Having worked part-time for Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Production while still a student at Waseda University, Yamazaki found full-time employment at the studio as a production manager after graduation. He sold his first television anime script in 1966, and soon became a prolific contributor to many shows in the sports and children's genres. His ...
Fisk, Nicholas
Pseudonym of UK musician, illustrator, publisher and author David Lee Higginbottom (1923-2016), who wrote exclusively for children, reportedly beginning to publish short stories before World War Two (none has been identified). After some nonfiction, his first sf tale was Space Hostages (1967), in which his tastes for Hard-SF backgrounds and realistically conceived protagonists were competently expressed in a tale whose young protagonists must learn how ...
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 ...