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Saturday 29 August 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 24 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Melancholia
Film (2011). Zentropa Entertainments. Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Cast includes Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Alexander Skarsgård, Stellan Skarsgård and Kiefer Sutherland. 136 minutes. Colour. / On a Swedish island estate, a depressive bride (Dunst) blows off her lavish wedding and awaits the End of the World with her sister (Gainsbourg) as the newly-discovered giant planet Melancholia ...
Nelson, Camilla
(1967- ) Australian author of Perverse Acts (1998), a Near Future story set in a Dystopian Australia beset by violent conflict between the right and the centre (see Politics). [JC]
You Only Live Twice
Film (1967). Eon/United Artists. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Written by Roald Dahl, based very loosely on You Only Live Twice (1964) by Ian Fleming. Cast includes Sean Connery, Mie Hama, Donald Pleasence, Tetsuro Tamba and Akiko Wakabayashi. 116 minutes. Colour. / Several of Fleming's James Bond novels were Technothrillers, mildly sf-oriented (though set in the ...
Dunn, Katherine
(1945-2016) US author, teacher and radio personality whose third novel, Geek Love (1989), is a densely told tale of a family which breeds its own circus freaks through a kind of Genetic Engineering; in the end the book reads, however, not primarily as sf (see Equipoise), but as an extremely expert Fabulation on the primordial theme of the family romance. Dunn's novel should not be ...
Sobel, Irwin Philip
(1901-1991) US paediatrician and author whose second novel, The Virus Killer (1975), is an sf thriller in which a Pandemic caused by an unknown virus (see Medicine) threatens New York and the world. [JC]
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 ...