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Friday 13 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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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Yu, Charles
(1976- ) US lawyer and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Third Class Superhero" and other stories assembled as Third Class Superhero (coll 2006), none of these tales having been previously published; several stories in his second collection, Sorry Please Thank You: Stories (coll 2012), appeared previously in journals, including the impressive "Standard Loneliness Package" (November 2010 ...
Identity Exchange
The two-way version of Identity Transfer (which see). Although less plausible than one-way transfer in which the victim's personality is destroyed or suppressed, such identity swaps have a satisfying narrative neatness. The exchange of bodies and resulting forced education in another's viewpoint presents opportunities for Humour, exploited in such popular novels as F Anstey's ...
Giant from the Unknown
Film (1958; vt Giant from Devil's Crag). Screencraft Enterprises/Astor Pictures Corporation. Produced by Arthur A Jacobs. Written by Frank Hart Tauss and Ralph Brooke. Directed by Richard E Cunha (credited as Richard Cunha). Makeup by Jack Pierce. Cast includes Morris Ankrum, Buddy Baer, Sally Fraser and Ed Kemmer (credited as Edward Kemmer). 77 minutes. Black and white. / In the sixteenth century, Vargas the Giant (Baer) – a depraved, ...
Heine, William C
(1919-1991) Canadian journalist, editor-in-chief 1967-1984 of The London Free Press (London, Ontario), and author in whose Near-Future novel The Last Canadian (1974; vt Death Wind 1976; vt The Last American 1986) the survivor of a devastating Pandemic flees northwards into ice and snow; it was later filmed, under yet another title, as The Patriot (1998). [JC]
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 ...