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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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Atomic Submarine, The
Film (1959; vt The Atomic Sub). Gorham Productions/Allied Artists. Produced by Alex Gordon. Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennett (credited as Spencer G Bennett). Written by Orville H Hampton from an original story by Irving Block and Jack Rabin (uncredited). Cast includes Dick Foran, Arthur Franz and Brett Halsey. 80 minutes cut to 72 minutes. Black and white. / In what was then the Near Future of the mid-1960s, cargo submarines (see ...
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Film (1989). Interscope Communications/Soisson-Murphey/De Laurentiis. Director Stephen Herek. Written by Chris Matheson, Ed Solomon. Cast includes Robert V Barron, Terry Camilleri, George Carlin, Al Leong, Keanu Reeves, Jane Wiedlin and Alex Winter. 89 minutes. Colour. / Because the tranquillity of future life depends on the cultural changes brought about by a late-twentieth-century rock band called Wyld Stallyns, an emissary from the future named Rufus (Carlin) undergoes ...
Letts, Barry
(1925-2009) UK Television producer, actor, scriptwriter and author, primarily associated with Doctor Who, though he was active in the theatre from before World War Two, in a career lasting nearly seventy years. His work as producer for the 1969-1974 seasons of Doctor Who featuring Jon Pertwee (1919-1996) arguably saved the series: partly because of his savvy decision to keep the Doctor earthbound, where a non-sf audience ...
Disney on Television
Aside from a one-off special in 1950 to promote Alice in Wonderland (1951), the Walt Disney Company's involvement with Television was initially to fund and advertise Disneyland – whose opening ceremony would be broadcast on ABC, watched by 70 million people. ABC had helped fund the park in return for a television series, Walt Disney's Disneyland (1954-1958), which was followed by ...
Hadfield, Chris
(1959- ) Canadian soldier, astronaut, broadcaster and author, pilot in the Canadian air force for twenty-five years from 1977, during which time he crewed in joint Canadian-American space shuttle flights. After The Darkest Dark (2016 chap), a tale of space travel for younger children, he is of sf interest for The Apollo Murders (2021), an Alternate History ...
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 ...