SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
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McMullen, Sean
(1948- ) Australian author whose first professional sf sale was "The Pharaoh's Airship" in Omega Science Digest for July/August 1986. Some of the best of his craftsmanlike stories, several of them involving Time Travel, appear in Call to the Edge (coll 1992), a notable example being "The Colours of the Masters" (March 1988 F&SF), in which a nineteenth-century ...
Liberty
Major US weekly magazine which ran from 10 May 1924 to July 1950. It was founded by Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune who wanted a magazine along the lines of Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post. Liberty never reached the heights of those magazines, but it was still regarded as a prestigious market. The initial editor, John Neville Wheeler, built up the circulation primarily for women ...
Bomba Films
A series of twelve Jungle Movies [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] starring Johnny Sheffield, who had played, alongside Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, the part of Tarzan's adopted son Boy in eight of the Tarzan Films; the character came from the Bomba the Jungle Boy series of twenty books written by John William ...
Boitard, Pierre
(1787-1859) French botanist, geologist and author, whose two works of sf interest are composed for young readers; each title appeared separately in 1830s journals, and was subsequently assembled in revised form in Paris avant les hommes (coll 1861; trans Brian Stableford as Journey to the Sun 2016). The framing narrative, in which a demon conducts a human interlocutor on a guided tour of regions of interest, is shared. "Etudes ...
Cinefex
US Cinema perfect-bound 8 x 9 in magazine printed on slick paper in similar format to a trade paperback. Published by Don Shay/Cinefex LLC. Editors John Duncan, others. 172 issues 1980-2021. Quarterly. / Cinefex grew largely out of publisher Shay's love for the films and visual effects work of Willis H O'Brien, and over the years it remained a cornerstone magazine for those interested in state-of-the-art cinematic ...
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 ...