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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
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Area 51
Area 51 is a United States Air Force base in southern Nevada, the existence of which was not formally acknowledged by the US Government until 1995. This secrecy and the classified nature of the base's work have made it a magnet for Paranoia-fraught conspiracy theories, the most popular of which relate to UFOs and Aliens (often linked to the supposed crashed Spaceship recovered near ...
Smith, Basil A
(1908-1969) UK author and Church of England clergyman; of genre interest are his five stories, unpublished during his lifetime and posthumously assembled as The Scallion Stone (coll 1980); these have been compared to the horror tales of M R James (1862-1936), with whose work he was familiar. Two feature supernatural phenomena with Horror in SF overtones. "The Scallion Stone" (August 1977 Whispers) hints at a tentacled ...
Dixie, Florence
(1855-1905) UK traveller, journalist (the first female war correspondent in the English language) and author whose nonfiction Across Patagonia: A Lady Combs the Pampas (1880) – the only woman in her party, she was its dominant figure – captures something of her Feminist urgency. In Gloriana, or The Revolution of 1900 (1890) a woman disguised as a man is elected Prime Minister of the UK and, though unmasked, establishes full ...
Frazier, Robert
(1951- ) US editor and author, most active as a poet, whose several published volumes include Peregrine (coll 1978), Perception Barriers (coll 1987), Co-Orbital Moons (coll 1988) and, perhaps most notably, Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest (coll 1992 chap) with Bruce Boston and Invisible Machines (coll 1993 chap) with Andrew Joron. He ...
Prisoners of Gravity
Canadian tv series (1990-1993). TVOntario; also broadcast on La Chaine Francaise. Produced and directed by Gregg Thurlbeck, written and presented Rick Green. Four seasons. 30 minutes per programme. Colour. / The premise of this vigorous and surprisingly successful series – not a drama series but a talk show about speculative fiction, probably the only such programme in the world – was that Commander Rick (Rick Green) operates a pirate broadcasting station from the ...
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 ...