SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 19 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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Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Film (1977). Columbia. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Script credited to Spielberg but early draft actually written by Paul Schrader (1946- ), who disagreed with Spielberg over the treatment of his script and withdrew his name from the project. Cast includes Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Cary Guffey and François Truffaut. 135 minutes. Colour. / After Star Wars ...
Waterloo, Stanley
(1846-1913) US editor, journalist and author who began to publish short fiction in the late 1860s; his first sf novel, The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man (1897; vt A Tale of the Time of the Cave Men: Being the Story of Ab 1904), is a juvenile culture-hero protagonists makes the Inventions required and acquires the necessary culture – along with strict monogamy on Eugenical lines made ...
Moffat, W Graham
(1866-1951) UK author whose What's the World Coming To? (1893) with John White takes the form of a series of discussions, set in 2003 CE, of the various marvels which the twentieth century has seen. The tone is Satirical; the targets include Edward Bellamy, fictional Clichés such as crime detection by psychic means, and concerns such as Feminism. [JC]
My Hero Academia
Japanese animated tv series (2016-current). Original title Boku no Hero Academia. Based on the Manga by Kōhei Horikoshi. Studio Bones. Directors include Masahiro Mukai, Kenji Nagasaki and Naomi Nakayama. Written by Kōhei Horikoshi and Yôsuke Kuroda. Voice cast includes Go Inoue, Kenta Miyake, Nobuhiko Okamoto and Daiki Yamashita. 159 24-minute episodes to date (plus ten OVAs). Colour. / My Hero Academia ...
Hales, C L
Working name of UK author Charles Laurence Hales (1873-? ), a barrister-at-law whose occasional diversions included the proto-Cosy Catastrophe children's novel The Wooden Heads (1924 Chatterbox; 1926), about a family menaced by strange wooden-seeming beings in a London mysteriously emptied of people by some quirk of the Fourth Dimension. The household members ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...