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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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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Rocketship X-M
Film (1950; vt Expedition Moon). Lippert. Produced, directed and written by Kurt Neumann. Cast includes Lloyd Bridges, John Emery and Osa Massen. 78 minutes. Black and white. / This cheap movie was hastily made to beat the more illustrious Destination Moon (1950) to the theatres. A Rocket on its way to the Moon is diverted by a storm of meteors and lands on ...
WSFA Journal
US club Fanzine, first series 1965-1977 edited by Don Miller; second series, following a hiatus, 1988-current under various editors. US quarto (letter-size) format. Published for the Washington SF Association based in Washington, District of Columbia. / Besides items relating to WSFA and local Fandom, the WSFA Journal contained articles of general sf interest, including in its early years a regular column by Thomas Burnett ...
Sayles, John
(1950- ) US author and film-maker who made his reputation as a writer with the novels Pride of the Bimbos (1975) and Union Dues (1977) and his collection The Anarchist's Convention (coll 1979). He began writing scripts for exploitation movies in the late 1970s, and enjoyed a burst of creativity in association with Roger Corman, Joe Dante, Lewis Teague and Steven ...
Nahum, Maurice
(1916-1994) UK publisher and editor who was Samuel Assael's junior partner in the John Spencer and Co publishing enterprise (1946-1983), best known or most infamous for its Badger Books (which see) imprint. Assael and Nahum co-edited three of the four 1950s Spencer sf magazines given separate entries in this encyclopedia: Futuristic Science Stories (1950-1954) under the pseudonym ...
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 ...