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Thursday 14 May 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 11 May 2026
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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Underwood-Miller Inc
US Small Press founded in 1976 by Pennsylvania-based Chuck Miller and Tim Underwood, who worked in California. Their first book, a first hardcover edition of Jack Vance's The Dying Earth (1950; their edition 1976) almost accidentally set them on a course which would identify them with that author, many of whose works, new ...
Gamow, George
(1904-1968) Russian physicist born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov, involved in the development of quantum theory at Göttingen and later a colleague of Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937). He defected in 1934 to the US, working from that year at George Washington University, where he eventually held the chair of theoretical physics; he became a US citizen in 1940, but was barred from the Manhattan Project, presumably as a security risk. After ...
Invaders from Mars
1. Film (1953). National Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Written by Richard Blake (and John Tucker Battle, uncredited). Cast includes Helena Carter, Leif Erickson, Arthur Franz and Jimmy Hunt. 78 minutes (82 minutes in Europe). Colour. / A small, disturbing, curiously memorable film by the director of Things to Come (1936), made for children but capable of terrifying them. Through a little boy's ...
Spencer, John
(1944-2002) UK author, rock musician and one-time art-agency director, founding what would become Young Artists, a major UK agency for preponderantly sf/fantasy artists. His first sf novel, The Electronic Lullaby Meat Market (1975), in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Mick Farren, sets a quirky thriller in a violently hyperbolic Near-Future world described in sex-charged terms reminiscent of the late-1960s ...
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 ...