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Saturday 17 October 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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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Underwood, Tim
(1948- ) US publisher (see Underwood-Miller Inc), bibliographer of Jack Vance in Fantasy and Science Fiction by Jack Vance (1977 chap) with Chuck Miller and Fantasms: A Bibliography of the Literature of Jack Vance (1978 chap with Daniel J H Levack; rev vt ...
Venus
Because Earth's inner neighbour in the Solar System presented a bright and featureless face to early astronomers, it became something of a mystery planet. Nineteenth-century astronomers and early-twentieth-century sf writers generally imagined that, as the featureless face was a permanent cloud layer, the surface beneath must be warm and wet; the Venus of the imagination became a planet of vast oceans (perhaps with no land at all) or sweltering jungles. In the ...
Matinee
Film (1993). Universal. Directed by Joe Dante, screenplay Charlie Haas from a story by Jerico and Charlie Haas. Cast includes Simon Fenton, John Goodman, Lisa Jakub, Omri Katz and Cathy Moriarty. 99 minutes. Colour. / Not so much an sf movie as a movie giving a cultural critique of sf movies. The setting is Key West, Florida, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war for a time seemed imminent. Teenager Gene Loomis (Fenton) is new in town, ...
Lightspeed
US professional Online Magazine initially devoted exclusively to science fiction, published by Sean Wallace via Prime Books until December 2011, and edited by John Joseph Adams, who also took over as publisher from January 2012 at which time it also absorbed Fantasy Magazine and made fantasy fiction part of its content. It has appeared monthly as an ...
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 ...