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Tuesday 9 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 ...
West, Pamela
(1945- ) US author whose novel, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1987), is nonfantastic; her sf novel, 20/20 Vision (1990), is an intricate Time-Travel tale in which a murder in 1995 is brooded over by a detective in 2020 and solved through the agency of time-travelling archivists from 2040, who send the detective back – via a form of Computer-enhanced ...
20 Million Miles to Earth
Film (1957). Columbia. Produced by Charles H Schneer. Directed by Nathan Juran. Written by Bob Williams, Christopher Knopf, based on a story by Charlott Knight, Ray Harryhausen. Cast includes William Hopper, Frank Puglia, Joan Taylor and John Zaremba. 84 minutes. Black and white. / In this typical Monster Movie a Spaceship returns to Earth from Venus ...
James, R M
(? - ) US author, female, whose Sorrows sequence beginning with Hear Me Scream (2013) depicts a Near Future America after economic collapse and plague, in the wake of which Mutants appear, but must struggle against savage opposition in order to establish themselves as a step in Evolution. The history of Slavery in ...
Cohen, Barney
Working name of US author Bernard Halsband Cohen (1944- ), whose first novel of genre interest was The Night of the Toy Dragons (1977). The Taking of Satcon Station (1982) with Jim Baen, the first of two Asher Bockhorn sf thrillers, is an engagingly over-the-top application of private-eye idioms and plots (Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon [1930] being much in evidence) to near space, the ...
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 ...