SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 29 April 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 28 April 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Space Master X-7
Film (1958). Regal Films. Directed by Edward Bernds. Written by Daniel Manwairing, George Worthing Yates, and Edward Bernds (uncredited). Cast includes Joan Barry, Robert Ellis, Paul Frees, Moe Howard, Lyn Thomas, Bill Williams and Rhoda Williams. 71 minutes. Black and white. / An unmanned space probe returns to Earth containing samples of an Alien lifeform. When Scientist Charles Pommer (Frees) begins studying the samples at ...
Bidston, Lester
(1883-1938) UK author of stories for the early-twentieth-century Boys' Papers, including contributions to the Dixon Hawke series of detective tales, and of thirteen Sexton Blake thrillers (some published anonymously) between 1927 and 1939; his only sf book proper under his own name was A Leap Through Space (1921), a tale whose young protagonists visit various planets, including an inhabited Mars. ...
Cummins, Harle Oren
US author (1877-1937) who began selling stories to Pulp magazines and newspapers while studying mining engineering at MIT. Of those stories collected in Welsh Rarebit Tales (coll 1902) at least four, including "The Space Annihilator" (September 1901 Argosy as "Martin Bradley's Space Annihilator") and "The Man Who Made a Man" (in Welsh Rarebit Tales; no previous publication traced despite Peter ...
Island of the Lost
Made-for-tv film (1967; vt Dangerous Island). Ivan Tors Productions for ABC-TV. Produced by Ivan Tors. Directed by John Florea. Written by Richard Carlson from an original story by Carlson and Tors. Cast includes Jose De Vega, Richard Greene, Luke Halpin, Robin Mattson and Sheila Welles. 92 minutes. Colour. / Anthropologist Josh MacRae (Greene) rashly takes his family – two daughters (Welles, Mattson) and a son (Halpin) – plus a couple of research assistants on an ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...