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Sunday 29 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
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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, ...
Meme
Term coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins (1941- ) in The Selfish Gene (1976), denoting "a unit of cultural transmission", a pattern of information which – analogous to the gene in Biology – tends to propagate itself. The general concept had previously been discussed by the biologist Jacques Monod (1910-1976) in Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (1971), and may ...
Eidolon
Australian Semiprozine, published from North Perth, Western Australia, by Eidolon Publications, quarterly (but later somewhat irregular) from #1, Autumn 1990 (published in May 1990) to #29/30, Autumn (May) 2000, edited by Jeremy G Byrne (1964-2021), Keira McKenzie, Robin Pen, Richard Scriven, Jonathan Strahan, Chris Stronach to #6 (October 1991); thereafter only Byrne, Scriven and Strahan to ...
MacBride, Stuart B
(? - ) Scottish author, mostly of thrillers from 2005 as Stuart MacBride, and of an sf thriller, Halfhead (2009), set in a moderately distant Near Future Glasgow a decade after violent social upheavals, caused by excesses of Virtual Reality, have killed millions; in the Dystopian aftermath of this, criminals (see ...
Hatton, Jackie
(? - ) Australian-born author, in USA for many years, and in the Netherlands from about 2005; her sf novel Flesh & Wires (2015) moves sharply from a conventional beginning – an Alien Invasion has created a Ruined Earth – into a long but active scrutiny of the culture subsequently created by a small group of survivors in a ...
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 ...
