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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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Atomic Kid, The
Film (1954). Mickey Rooney Productions/Republic Pictures. Produced by Rooney. Directed by Leslie H Martinson. Written by Blake Edwards, Benedict Freeman, and John Fenton Murray. Cast includes Whit Bissell, Elaine Devry (credited as Elaine Davis), Mickey Rooney and Robert Strauss. 86 minutes. Black and white. / A pair of uranium prospectors, Barnaby Waterberry (Rooney) and Stan Cooper (Strauss) are stranded in the Nevada desert when their vehicle breaks down. They stumble upon an ...
Matiushin, Mikhail
(1861-1934) Russian Futurist artist and composer. The music he composed for the avant-garde opera Pobieda iad sopitsem ["Victory over the Sun"] (1921) has mostly been lost, although both the libretto (by Aleksei Kruchenykh, 1886-1968, in the invented language "Zaum") and accounts of the original performances remain. The narrative of the opera concerns a group of astronauts who wage war upon the Sun, destroying and burying it in order to release a new, ...
Lee Tung
(? - ) Indian author whose interesting sf novel, The Wind Obeys Lama Toru (1967), is a complex story about Overpopulation in which fertility and sterility Drugs act and counteract, driving the population up and down disastrously until the year 2175. [JC]
Ferenczy, Árpád
(1877-circa 1930) Hungarian author of several works in Hungarian, before publishing in German (apparently translated from manuscript by Hans Otto Werda) his sf novel Timotheus Thümmel und seine Ameisen (1923; trans anon as The Ants of Timothy Thümmel 1924), a Satire featuring a race of Ants in central Africa whose Intelligence exceeds that of humans, and who engage ...
Lunatic, Sir Humphry
Pseudonym used by Irish actor, critic, playwright and author Francis Gentleman (1728-1784), whose working years were spent mostly in England, for a Proto SF imitation – and perhaps conscious Parody of – the Fantastic Voyage as found in the work of Cyrano de Bergerac and others; the tale, ...
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 ...