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Tuesday 17 February 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 16 February 2026
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Stone, Idella Purnell
(1901-1982) Mexican-born teacher, librarian, editor and author who also wrote as Idella Purnell, in US intermittently from before 1920, though she spent considerable periods in Mexico; most of her fiction was written for the Young Adult market. Of some sf interest are two tales with Lost Race implications: in Lost Princess of Yucatan (1931), two girls discover in a secret location lost Mayan artefacts, including an ...
Planetes
Japanese animated tv series (2003-2004). Sunrise. Directed by Gorō Taniguchi. Written by Ichirō Ōkouchi and Makoto Yukimura, based on the Manga by Makoto Yukimura. Voice cast includes Ai Orikasa, Kazunari Tanaka, Unshô Ishizuka and Satsuki Yukino. 26 25-minute episodes. Colour. / In 2075 first-world corporations dominate space and the exploitation of its resources. As their ...
Spaceships
The suggestion that people might one day travel to the Moon inside a flying machine was first put forward seriously by John Wilkins in 1638. There had been cosmic voyages prior to that date, and there were to be many more thereafter (see Fantastic Voyages; Space Flight), but few took the mechanics of the journey seriously enough to invest much imaginative effort in ...
Slaughterhouse-Five
Film (1972). Vanadas/Universal. Directed by George Roy Hill. Written by Stephen Geller, based on Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Cast includes Sharon Gans, Ron Leibman, Valerie Perrine, Eugene Roche and Michael Sacks. 104 minutes. Colour. / A middle-class, middle-aged American (Sacks), dissatisfied with his job, marriage and life in general, starts to experience sudden shifts in time, mainly ...
Cryonics
A term coined in the 1960s by Karl Werner, referring to techniques for preserving the human body by supercooling. R C W Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality (1964) popularized the idea that the corpses of terminally ill people might be "frozen down" in order to preserve them until such a time as medical science would discover cures for all ills and a method of resurrecting the dead. Many sf stories have extrapolated the notion. / 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 ...