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Tuesday 10 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 9 March 2026
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Monster of Piedras Blancas, The
US film (1959). Vanwick Productions. Directed by Irvin Berwick. Written by H Haile Chace. Cast includes Frank Arvidson, Jeanne Carmen, Pete Dunn, John Harmon, Forrest Lewis, Don Sullivan and Les Tremayne. 71 minutes. Black and white. / Misanthropic widower Mr Sturges (Harmon) will angrily warn off any passers-by who get too close to his lighthouse; set on the mainland, this is but a short distance from a coastal town. Here we see a group of locals staring into a small boat, where two ...
Pattison, Eliot
(1951- ) US author most of whose fiction consists of thrillers in the Inspector Shan sequence. Ashes of Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America (2011), is set in a Post-Holocaust America twenty-five years after the country has been devastated by international terrorism. An original founder of the village of Carthage – now a harsh pocket Dystopia in which knowledge of the ...
Beaumont, Charles
(1929-1967) US scriptwriter and author, who was born Charles Leroy Nutt but legally changed his name to Charles Beaumont; in various 1940s Fanzines he used the pen-name Charles McNutt, his byline as editor of Utopia (1 issue, 1942) and co-editor of Starlit Fantasy (2 issues 1942-1943) with Harry Schmarje; he also published fanzine illustrations in collaboration with fan artist Wilma Bellingham under the joint pseudonym E T Beaumont. He began publishing ...
Rechts, Albert
Pseudonym of Irish lawyer, journalist and author Charles Brett (1928-2005), who wrote architectural studies as C E B Brett; Handbook to a Hypothetical City (1986 chap) as Albert Rechts traces the contours through time of a City not dissimilar to those that appear in the works of Italo Calvino, with the lives depicted here in outline strongly evoking the elaborately staged lives of urban dwellers in many ...
Plater, Alan
(1935-2010) UK Television screenwriter and playwright, extremely prolific from the early 1960s until his death; he is of sf interest for his 1988 television version of Chris Mullin's Near Future A Very British Coup (1982), in which America subverts a left-leaning UK government (see Politics). The novel ends with the morally ambiguous forced resignation of ...
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 ...