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Saturday 19 September 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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Kerr, Alvah Milton
(1853-1924) US author active from 1888, who began publishing work of genre interest with "At the Styx's Marge" for Munsey's Magazine in March 1896, and whose Young Adult novel, Two Young Inventors: The Story of a Flying Boat (1904), describes the eponymous Invention and the lads' adventures piloting it. Kerr's late-life involvement in Theosophy seems ...
Rollerball
1. Film (1975). United Artists. Directed by Norman Jewison. Written by William Neal Harrison, based on his "Roller Ball Murder" (September 1973 Esquire). Cast includes Maud Adams, John Beck, James Caan and John Houseman. 129 minutes, cut to 125 minutes. Colour. / That one man who stands tall and proud can topple a corrupt system by his example is the moral of this sluggish big-budget movie. In a future run by corporations, ...
Winters, Ben H
(1976- ) US playwright, journalist and author whose first books – including The Jewish Comedy Thesaurus: 3,102 Quips, Quotes, and Kvetches (2007) and the Worst-Case Scenario series of spoofs with David Borgenicht and Robin Epstein – were comic nonfiction. He is of sf interest for two series. His contributions to his publisher's Quirk Classics sequence are Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009) with Jane Austen ...
McMullan, Thomas
(? - ) Scottish teacher, journalist and author resident in England. The protagonist of his first novel, The Last Good Man (2020), which is set in the Near Future after a pervasive Pandemic-like planetary Disaster, escapes a disintegrating City to visit the remote village where his cousin lives. Impossibly placid and twee, ...
Swindells, Robert E
(1939- ) UK translator and author who has concentrated for most of his career on Young Adult novels, several of them set in his native Yorkshire. Although most of his work has been fantasy, sf novels of interest have appeared at various points over this career, beginning with When Darkness Comes (1973), a Prehistoric SF tale movingly depicting the consequences of the incursion 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 ...