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Sunday 15 June 2025
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 June 2025
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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend
Film (1985; vt Dinosaur ... Secret of the Lost Legend). Touchstone Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company), Buena Vista Distribution. Produced by Jonathan T Taplin and Roger Spottiswood. Directed by Bill L Norton (credited as B W L Norton). Written by Clifford and Ellen Greene, based on the juvenile storybook by David Lee Miller. Cast includes William Katt, Patrick McGoohan and Sean Young. 95 minutes. Colour. / Two young married ...
Worlds Beyond
US Digest-size magazine; three issues, monthly December 1950 to February 1951, published by Hillman Periodicals; edited by Damon Knight. Worlds Beyond was divided between original and reprint material, and between sf and fantasy. New stories of note included "Null-P" by William Tenn (January 1951) and Harry Harrison's first story, "Rock Diver" (February 1951); ...
Herbert, Edward G
(1869-1938) UK author of Newaera: A Socialist Romance, with a Chapter on Vaccination (1910). This novel describes a socialist Utopia which is founded on an isolated Island, but tragically fails. [JC]
Devil Commands, The
US film (1941). Columbia Pictures. Based on William Sloane's The Edge of Running Water (1939). Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Written by Robert Andrews and Milton Gunzburg. Cast includes Dorothy Adams, Amanda Duff, Boris Karloff, Kenneth MacDonald, Ralph Penney, Anne Revere and Shirley Warde. 65 minutes. Black and white. / The narrator, Anne Blair (Duff), does not know where her father Dr Julian Blair ...
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 ...