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Tuesday 13 January 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.
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von Däniken, Erich
(1935-2026) Swiss author of a series of purportedly nonfiction books, beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968; trans Michael Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969), which, based on a mass of often suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was visited by at least one Alien spacefaring race before and at the dawn of historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid of ...
War-Gods of the Deep
Film (1965; vt City in the Sea). Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors (UK), American International Pictures (US). Produced by Daniel Haller and George Willoughby. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. Written by Charles Bennett and Louis M Heyward with additional dialogue by David Whitaker. Based very loosely on Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The City in the Sea" (in Poems, coll 1831 chap, as ...
Levene, Philip
(1926-1973) UK scriptwriter and credited co-author of City of the Hidden Eyes (1960) with J L Morrissey, based on Levene's eight-part BBC Radio serial from 27 April 1959, in which the surface world is threatened by Monsters who occupy a City far Underground; it is likely that adaptation of script to novel was entirely by Morrissey. ...
Once a Hero
US tv series (1987). Garden Party Productions/New World International for ABC-TV. Created by Dusty Kay. Produced by Paul Pompian, and others. Directors included Harry Hurwitz, Kevin Hooks, and Claudia Weill. Writers included Ira Steven Behr and Kay. Cast includes Robert Forster, Jeff Lester and Milo O'Shea. Five 60-minute episodes. Colour. / Comics writer Abner Bevis (O'Shea) finds himself repeating his own plots for his ...
Heartbeeps
Film (1981). Universal. Directed by Allan Arkush. Written by John Hill. Cast includes Andy Kaufman, Bernadette Peters and Randy Quaid. 79 minutes. Colour. / Obviously disliked by its distributors, who trimmed it by ten minutes before release (not enough action) and then allowed it to sink almost without trace, this film is a mildly amusing, perhaps over-cute, extremely silly comedy about two domestic Robots (male and female) who escape from the repair shop ...
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 ...