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Friday 27 February 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.
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Stark, Harriet
(1868-1944) US author in whose moral tale, The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of Today (1900), a lady is infected with a beauty-enhancing bacillus (see Biology). Her character – as dramatized through the diary she keeps – subsequently deteriorates, and she dies. [JC/PN]
Mayhew, Julie
(? - ) UK actor, playwright and author whose first novel, the Young Adult Red Ink (2013), engages peripherally with supernatural material. Her second novel, The Big Lie (2015), is a Hitler Wins tale set in an Alternate History Britain under German rule around 2014, and conflates its protagonist's coming of age with the gradual ...
Rieder, John
(1952- ) US academic with the Department of English at the University of Hawaii from 1980 until he retired in 2018; a member of the editorial board of Extrapolation. His Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) is an important study of the colonialism and Imperialism themes in sf (including Gothic SF) from its beginnings to the ...
Saint, H F
(1941- ) US businessman and author whose sf novel, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1987), filmed as Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), treats the question of Invisibility as a series of problems in practical living, in direct contrast to the aspirational hubris evinced by the Antihero in H G Wells's ...
Spaceways
Film (1953). Hammer/Exclusive. Directed by Terence Fisher. Written by Paul Tabori, Richard Landau, based on a 1952 radio play by Charles Eric Maine. Cast includes Eva Bartok, Howard Duff, Andrew Osborn and Alan Wheatley. 76 minutes. Black and white. / In this first UK space movie since Things to Come (1936) a Scientist falsely suspected of ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...