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Tuesday 15 July 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 14 July 2025
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Red Giant
Performance (2014). Composed by Adam Matlock; libretto by Brian Slattery; directed by Britt Olsen-Ecker. Produced by Rhymes With Opera, featuring Elisabeth Halliday (soprano), Bonnie Lander (soprano), and Robert Maril (baritone). / During their 2013-2014 season Rhymes With Opera produced Red Giant, a chamber opera composed by Adam Matlock for three singers and a small orchestra. Sf author Brian Francis Slattery wrote the libretto; ...
Slocombe, George
(1894-1963) UK journalist whose first assignment was to report on the sinking of the Titanic in 1912; and author whose Near Future Dictator (1932), a Scientific Romance set in an imaginary European country, describes the rise of a Dystopian tyranny there. Escape into the Past (1943) features an artist's wife who Timeslips ...
Stranger from Venus
Film (1954; vt Immediate Disaster; vt The Venusian US). Princess Pictures/Vitapix Corporation (US)/Rich and Rich Ltd. Produced by Burt Balaban and Gene Martel. Directed by Balaban. Written by Hans Jacoby from a story by Desmond Leslie. Cast includes Helmut Dantine, Cyril Luckham and Patricia Neal. 75 minutes. Black and white. / Driving near a small English village, Susan North (Neal) is distracted by something descending to earth; she ...
Rifbjerg, Klaus
(1931-2015) Danish poet and author, who has published at least 100 books since 1956; in his sf novel, De Hellige Aber (1981; trans Steve Murray as Witness to the Future 1987), two adolescents are transported almost half a century forward from 1941 (see Time Travel; World War Two), but find little in the year 1988 to give them joy about Progress. [JC]
Williams, David J
(1971- ) UK author whose Cyberpunk-flavoured Autumn Rain Trilogy – comprising The Mirrored Heavens (2008), The Burning Skies (2009) and The Machinery of Light (2010) – begins with the Near Future destruction of a Space Elevator and the assignment to protect America undertaken by two counterintelligence agents, who ...
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 ...