SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
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Vanishing Shadow, The
US Serial Film (1934). Universal Pictures. Directed by Lew Landers (as Louis Friedlander). Written by Basil Dickey, Het Mannheim, George Morgan and Ella O'Neill. Cast includes Richard Cramer, James Durkin, Ada Ince, Walter Miller, Onslow Stevens. Twelve 20-minute episodes. Black and white. / Stanley Stanfield (Stevens) visits Professor Carl Van Dorn (Durkin), the world's greatest authority on electrical energy and a friend of his late father, who had ...
Johnson, Bill
(1956-2022) US author, journalist, technical writer and business administrator, a Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop graduate, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Stormfall" in Clarion SF (anth 1977) edited by Kate Wilhelm. Much of his fiction is strongly flavoured by his South Dakota origins, as in his best-known story "We Will Drink a Fish Together ..." (May 1997 ...
Simmons, Geoffrey
(1943- ) US medical doctor and author whose first novel, The Z Papers (1976), is a Technothriller about an undiagnosable toxin; his first sf novel proper, The Adam Experiment (1978), set in a laboratory on an orbital Space Station, features an experiment in human procreation which runs up against the fact that Aliens have been monitoring ...
Foster, Alan Dean
(1946- ) US author, raised in Los Angeles; interestingly, he has listed Carl Barks (1901-2000) – the creator (long unacknowledged by Disney) of the best Comic strips and Big Little Books in the Disney stable – as one of his formative influences, specifically on his depiction of older characters. Foster began publishing sf with "Some Notes Concerning a Green Box" for The Arkham Collector in ...
Planète Sauvage, La
French/Czech animated film (1973; vt Fantastic Planet). Les Films Armorial/ORTF/Filmové studio Barrandov. Directed by René Laloux. Scenario and dialogue by Roland Topor (1938-1997) and Laloux, based on Oms en série ["Oms by the Dozen"] (1957) by Stefan Wul. Original artwork by Topor. 72 minutes. Colour. / The plot of this French/Czech ...
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 ...