SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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 ...
Kelly, James Patrick
(1951- ) US author who began to publish after attending the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in 1974. With "Dea Ex Machina" in Galaxy for April 1975 (as by James Kelly), he began very quickly to establish himself as an author whose work contained, within a sometimes sober demeanour, considerable pyrotechnical charge. In the selfconscious 1980s controversy between ...
Serpent's Egg, The
Film (1977). Known in Germany as Das Schlangenei. Dino De Laurentiis Corporation/Rialto Film/Bavaria Film. Directed and written by Ingmar Bergman. Cast includes Heinz Bennent, David Carradine, Gert Fröbe, Liv Ullmann and James Whitmore. 119 minutes. Colour. / Ingmar Bergman's thirty-eighth film as director has generally been understood as a failed attempt to give an intimate portrait of Weimar Berlin in 1923, a place and a period he did not know and was unlikely to ...
Percy, Benjamin
(1979- ) US teacher and author whose first works, focusing intensely on the hard wildness of inland, desert Oregon, had no direct fantastic content, though in some, like "The Woods" (February 2005 Amazing), his first tale of genre interest, that intensity of vision shifted comfortably into the supernatural. His first novel, The Wilding (2011), again with considerable force, conflates the latent violence inherent to an endangered ...
Adamovič, Ivan
(1967- ) Czech translator and author, an associate editor of the sf magazine Ikarie and a contributor to Encyklopedie science fiction ["Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"] (1992). His "Czech SF in the Last Forty Years" appeared in Science Fiction Studies, March 1990. [PN] see also: Czech and Slovak SF. /
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 ...