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Wednesday 16 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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Far Out Space Nuts
Juvenile tv series (1975-1976). Sid and Marty Krofft Enterprises for CBS-TV. Created by Sid and Marty Krofft (see The Krofft Brothers) with Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. Directors include Claudio Guzman, Wes Kenny and Walter C Miller. Writers include Chuck McCann, Earle Doud and Duane Poole. Cast includes Bob Denver, Patti Maloney and Chuck McCann. 15 25-minute episodes. Colour. / Two inept maintenance workers at a ...
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de
(1657-1757) French man of letters whose work pointed forward to the Age of Reason; nephew of the dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606-1684). He wrote much, and one of his most important books became a seminal influence on Proto SF: Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités (1686; exp 1687; trans Sir W D Knight as A Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds 1687; new trans Aphra Behn as ...
Murphy, John P
(? - ) US engineer and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Unintended Consequences" in Murphy's Blog for 11 March 2011, his best-known shorter work being the novella "The Liar" (March 2016 F&SF), whose protagonist finds that his routine dissimulations morph the world around him (see Horror in SF). Murphy's first novel, Red Noise (2020), is a ...
Goldston, Robert C
(1927-1982) US author of crime fiction, also under the pseudonym James Stark; of fantasies such as his first novel, The Eighth Day (1956), dealing with miracles in a religious context; and of The Shore Dimly Seen (1963), in which the passengers and crew of a yacht at sea apprehend a nuclear Holocaust from a distance as they approach a seemingly deserted America. / This author should not be confused with the artist James Stark who ...
Hot Gossip
Also known as "Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip". A UK dance troupe, choreographed by Arlene Phillips (1943- ), who appeared on a number of 1970s British television shows. Their 1978 hit single "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper", with Sarah Brightman (1960- ) on lead vocals, was released to cash in on the success of Star Wars (1977). It is a catchy though nonsensical piece of space-disco. [AR]
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 ...