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Wednesday 18 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 18 February 2026
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Kosmicheskiy Reys: Fantasticheskaya Novella
Russian film (1935; vt The Cosmic Journey). Mosfilm. Directed by Vasili Zhuravlev. Written by Aleksandr Filimonov, based on the novel Vne zemli (1920; trans as Beyond the Planet Earth 1960) by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Cast includes Vassili Gaponenko, Sergei Komarov and K Moskalenko. 70 minutes. Black and white. / After their equipment is tested by experimentally sending a ...
Biagi, L D
Working name of US author Lottie Biagi (circa 1872-? ); the surname is that of her first husband (married circa 1890), and she later became Lottie F Ambrose on her second marriage in 1912. Her Two Heroes and a Violin: An Extravaganza (1899) is a supernatural fiction. The protagonist of her sf novel The Centaurians (1911) as Biagi travels with his Scientist friend in a torpedo-like ship of the latter's ...
Condon, Richard
(1915-1996) US author, formerly in advertising, employed as a film publicist from 1936 to 1941 for Walt Disney and variously elsewhere until 1958; he is best-known for works outside the sf field such as the Prizzi sequence beginning with Prizzi's Honor (1982), and for rococo fantasies like A Talent for Loving; or, the Great Cowboy Race (1961), an extravagant spoof on Western topoi, and Money Is Love (1975); but ...
Meyer, Nicholas
(1945- ) US screenwriter and sometime director, known especially for Time After Time (1979), for his work on the original-series phase of the Star Trek film cycle, and latterly for his screen adaptations of non-sf works by Philip Roth. Beginning as a publicist, in which capacity he wrote a making-of book for Love Story (1971), he made an amusing debut ...
Cormier, Robert
(1925-2000) US author, highly esteemed for his Young Adult novels, especially perhaps The Chocolate War (1974), which is not fantastic. Of sf interest are The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (1983), which depicts the experiences of a child being experimented upon in a hospital called only the Complex; and Fade (1988), a tale of inherited Invisibility hovers ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...