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Saturday 13 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Singer, Rochelle
(1939-2022) US author, mostly of detective thrillers, who also wrote as Shelley Singer and Lee Singer; she is of sf interest for The Demeter Flower (1980), about a Near Future Feminist Utopia established on lesbian lines after the collapse of a patriarchal tyranny at the end of the twentieth century. [JC]
God Told Me To
Film (1976; vt Demon). Larco. Produced and directed by Larry Cohen. Written by Cohen. Cast includes Sandy Dennis, Tony Lo Bianco, Richard Lynch and Deborah Raffin. 89 minutes. Colour. / It is as well that Larry Cohen has his own production company, Larco, since it is impossible to imagine any other company taking on so eccentric a project. This is perhaps the most baroque sf movie ever made. A devout Catholic ...
Shear, David
(1938-2007) US biophysicist and author whose Near Future sf novel, Cloning (1972), complicatedly entwines the presence of Androids and Cloning in the world of 2020; the protagonist, a molecular biologist who is an unknowing member of a cluster of clones, must cope with profound issues of Identity, dramatized through an Android campaign ...
Ashwell, Pauline
Pseudonym of UK author Pauline Whitby (1926-2015), whose first book, Little Red Steamer (1941 chap), is a children's Fantasy, and who began writing sf at the age of fourteen with "Invasion from Venus" as Paul Ashwell for the small British magazine Yankee Science Fiction #21 in July 1942. Her real career, however, started with the stories she began to publish in Astounding as Pauline Ashwell, plus at least seven further ...
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 ...