SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 23 March 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 23 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Deighton, Len
Working name of UK illustrator and author Leonard Cyril Deighton (1929-2026), mostly not resident in Britain after 1969; author of spy novels, cookery books and some other nonfiction, but still perhaps best known for early espionage thrillers like The Ipcress File (1962), the first of the Secret File sequence which features the same undisciplined and unnamed secret agent, and the subsequent Funeral in Berlin (1964). The fourth volume of the series, ...
Defying Gravity
American-Canadian tv series (2009). British Broadcasting Corporation, Fox Television Studios, and Omni Film Productions for CTV, SPACE and ProSieben. Created by James D Parriot. Producers include Michael Chechik and Michael Edelstein. Writers include Parriot, Sheri Elwood, Meredith Lavender, and Marcie Ulin. Directors include Sturla Gunnarsson, David Straiton, Peter Howitt, Fred Gerber, and Jeff Woolnough. Cast includes Ron Livingston as Maddux Donner, Laura Harris as Zoe Barnes, Malik ...
Stark, Raymond
(1919-1983) US author who wrote detective stories as by John Norwood, and in whose Crossroads to Nowhere (1956) an anarchist unsuccessfully confronts an urban Near Future dictatorship before escaping into the wilds, where his kind may survive, and perhaps build a Utopia. [JC]
Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels and shorter fictions in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Coon, Susan
Pseudonym of US author Susan Plunkett (1945- ), author under her own name of several romance novels, including contributions to Jove Books's Time Passages multi-author sequence of Timeslip and Time Travel romances; as Coon, she wrote the Living Planet sequence – comprising Rahne (1980), Cassilee (1980), The Virgin (1981) and Chiy-Une ...
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 ...