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Wednesday 18 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Sliders
US tv series (1995-2000). Created by Traci Tormé and Robert K Weiss for Fox and The Sci Fi Channel. Producers include Tormé, Weiss, Chris Black, and Paul Cajero. Directors include Richard Compton, David E Peckinpah, Jerry O'Connell, and Reza Badiyi. Writers include Tormé, Weiss, Scott Smith Miller, and Tony Blake. Cast includes Jerry O'Connell as Quinn Mallory (seasons 1-4), Sabrina Lloyd as Wade Welles (seasons 1-3), John Rhys-Davies as Professor Maximilian Arturo ...
Sturgeon's Law
An aphorism formulated by Theodore Sturgeon in the early 1950s: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." This needs to be placed in context as his response to blanket condemnations of sf which were based on the worst examples of the genre. According to James Gunn, Sturgeon's Law originated in a Sturgeon talk at the 1953 Worldcon, and was phrased approximately as ...
Madariaga, Salvador de
(1886-1978) Spanish diplomat and man of letters who spent much of his life after 1916 in the UK and Switzerland, in particular between 1936 and 1975, during the rule of General Franco (1892-1975). In his sf novel, The Sacred Giraffe: Being the Second Volume of the Posthumous Works of Julio Arceval (1925), which is set in 6922 CE, the Blacks – who have survived much history, including the submergence of Europe – argue over the possibility that Whites ever actually ...
Conquistador de la Luna
["Conqueror of the Moon"] Mexican film (1960; vt The Astronauts). Producciones Sotomayor. Directed by Rogelio A González. Written by José Maria Fernández Unsáin and Francisco Verala. Cast includes Antonio "Clavillazo" Espino, Ramiro Gamboa, Alicia Moreno, Alberto Pedret, Ana Luisa Peluffo, Óscar Ortiz de Pinedo, Alejandro Reyna and Andrés Soler. 80 minutes. Black and white. / As a ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...