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Friday 17 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Jupiter Ascending
Film (2015). Warner Bros/Village Roadshow Pictures/Dune Entertainment. Directed and written by Andy (now Lilly) Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Cast includes Sean Bean, Douglas Booth, Mila Kunis, Tuppence Middleton, Eddie Redmayne, Channing Tatum. 127 minutes. Colour. / As well as an abundance of pleasurable visuals, and a sense that some of the shout-outs to both written and filmed sf are meant to draw a smile, there are moments in ...
Van Vorst, Bessie McGinnis
(1873-1928) US social reformer and author, mostly in France from around 1900, who usually wrote as Mrs John Van Vorst, but also as by Esther Kelly; her early nonfiction was mostly written in collaboration with her sister-in-law Marie Louise Van Vorst (1867-1936). She is of some sf interest for Magda Queen of Sheba: From the Ancient Royal Abyssinian Manuscript [for full title see Checklist below] (1907) as Mrs John Van Vorst, a Lost Race tale set in ...
Skaife, S H
(1889-1976) UK-born entomologist and author, in South Africa from 1913; most of his work comprises either technical studies or descriptions of the natural world for general readers. Of sf interest is The Strange Old Man (coll of linked stories 1930), tales in which the Drug-enabled Miniaturization of two children allows them, under the guidance of the eponymous scientist, to tour the air, the land, and ...
Long, Duncan
(1949-2016) US illustrator, author and editor of a Survivalist newsletter. His first novel, Anti-Grav Unlimited (1988; vt Antigrav Unlimited 3.1 2015), features a super-competent tinker/inventor hero (see Edisonade; Invention) who – in a Post-Holocaust atmosphere almost perfectly designed to serve as an arena for his exploits ...
Woolf, Virginia
(1882-1941) UK critic and author, a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group of English writers, famous for novels sensitively structured around the flow of inner consciousness, the best known of these being perhaps To the Lighthouse (1927). Of sf interest is Orlando: A Biography (1928), filmed as Orlando (1992), whose androgynous hero/heroine (see Temporal Adventuress), a portrait of Vita ...
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 ...