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Thursday 12 March 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.
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Nicholson, Geoff
(1953-2025) UK author most of whose work, often involving street-wise gonzo explorations of psyches and geographies, lies along the water margins of Fantastika; a tale like Bleeding London (1997), for instance, reads as though his unpacking of the fantasticated London at its heart represented a literal gazeteer: but, like most psychogeographies (see Iain Sinclair), it penetrates ...
Mosley, Walter
(1952- ) US author, best known for his crime fiction, in particular the Easy Rawlins sequence beginning with Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). He is of sf interest for several books. Blue Light (1998), an Equipoisal tale, traces the consequences of the eponymous radiance from space, which strikes the earth in discrete "needles" in 1965 and transforms (see Shapeshifters) ...
Trent, Gregory
One of several pseudonyms of US teacher, screenwriter and author Thames Ross Williamson (1894-1961), best known under his own name for a nonfantastic tale, Woods Colt (1933). His work of sf interest is restricted to Prehistoric SF tales for children, In the Stone Age: A Boy's Story of the Early Paleolithic Period (1937) and A Tamer of Beasts: A Boy's Story of the Early Neolithic Period (1938); their intent is ...
Radon
Film (1956; vt Sora no Daikaijū Radon ["Giant Monster of the Sky, Radon"]; vt, outside Japan, Rodan). Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Written by Takeshi Kimura and Takeo Murata, based on a story by Takashi Kuronomura. Cast includes Akihiko Hirata, Kenji Sahara and Yumi Shirkawa. 79 minutes. Colour. / This film, the first Japanese Kaiju Monster Movie in colour, is from the same team that produced ...
J J J
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? - ) of The Blue Shirts (1926), a Near Future political thriller in which the eponymous para-legal cadre attempts to create a Socialist Republic of Great Britain. Several separate Fascist organizations, each known as The Blue Shirts, were founded in or around 1932 in China, Ireland, Portugal; members of the Parti national social chrétien in mid-1930s ...
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 ...