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Saturday 12 September 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 7 September 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
LOLA
UK/Irish film (2022). Cowtown Pictures, Headgear Films, Kreo Films FZ. Directed by Andrew Legge. Written by Legge and Angeli MacFarlane; story by Henrietta Ashworth, Jessica Ashworth and Legge. Cast includes Emma Appleton, Rory Fleck Byrne, Aaron Monaghan and Stefanie Martini. 79 minutes. Black and white. / An opening caption tells us that in 2021 some reels of film were discovered in a country house in Sussex. What we see is that film. Two sisters, Thom (Appleton) and Mars (Martini) ...
Allan, Mea
(1909-1982) Scottish journalist – she was best-known as war correspondent and columnist for the Daily Herald – and author in whose Near Future novel, Change of Heart (1943), World War Two has been won by the Allies, but peace is threatened by a resurgence of Nazism. [JC]
Alien³
Film (1992). A Brandywine Production/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by David Fincher. Written by David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson, based on a story by Vincent Ward. Cast includes Charles Dance, Charles S Dutton, Brian Glover, Lance Henriksen, Paul McGann and Sigourney Weaver. 110 minutes. Colour. / One of Hollywood's occasional, strange films so unmitigatedly uncommercial that it is impossible to work out why they were ever made. The film had an unusually troubled ...
Green, Joseph
(1931-2026) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" in New Worlds for February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus stories (not all sf) have ...
Webb, Catherine
(1986- ) UK author who also writes as by Kate Griffin and Claire North, often for the Young Adult market; her first works – like the Wizard Laenan Kite sequence beginning with Mirror Dreams (2002) – were fantasy. The Horatio Lyle sequence – beginning with The Extraordinary Adventures of Horatio Lyle (2006) and ending with ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...