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Wednesday 18 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.
Site updated on 18 February 2026
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Kon Satoshi
(1963-2010) Japanese Manga artist and Anime director whose brief career produced several landmark works questioning human Perception of reality (see also Metaphysics). Kon became an art assistant to Katsuhiro Ōtomo while still a student at Musashino Arts University, and was acclaimed for his early manga work Toriko ["Captive"] (1984 ...
Turner, E S
(1909-2006) UK journalist and nonfiction author who for more than fifty years contributed articles – most of them quirkily factual – to Punch magazine. His first book Boys Will Be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al (1948; exp rev 1957; exp rev 1975) is a useful survey of Boys' Papers. Later editions briefly covered the 1950s UK horror- ...
Independence Day
Film (1996). Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation presents a Centropolis Entertainment production. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Written by Emmerich, Dean Devlin. Cast includes Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, Mary McDonnel, Bill Pullman, Randy Quaid and Will Smith. 145 minutes (special edition 153). Colour. / A vast Alien Spaceship enters Earth's orbit on the morning of 2 July. Within hours a ...
Dr Who and the Daleks
Film (1965). AARU. Directed by Gordon Flemyng. Written by Milton Subotsky, based on the second Doctor Who television story, the seven-episode The Mutants (1963-1964; also known as The Dead Planet and The Daleks) by Terry Nation. Cast includes Roy Castle, Peter Cushing, Jenny Linden and Roberta Tovey. 85 minutes. Colour. / The Doctor – played colourlessly by Cushing as a polite old man ...
Stars
The stars have always exerted a powerful imaginative fascination upon the human mind. When they were thought to be mere points of light in the panoply of heaven, it was believed by astrologers that the secrets of the future were written there, and various cultures wove their Mythology into the patterns of various constellations. Not until 1718 did Edmond Halley (1656-1742) demonstrate that the stars were not "fixed", and not until the late 1830s were the distances ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...