SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 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: The League of Fan Funds
Collins, Mortimer
(1827-1876) UK poet and author, moderately prolific in various genres; one collection of poetry, The Inn of Strange Meetings and Other Poems (coll 1871), contains Arthurian material. His three novels of sf interest are each of only tangential interest, but are good examples of how sf could be used in nineteenth-century Britain to avoid the implications of scientific discoveries like Evolution. Miranda: A Midsummer Madness (1873 3vols) ...
Jarman, Peter
Pseudonym of UK electronics entrepreneur and futurologist Peter Kruger (? - ), whose Three Jumps into the Labyrinth (coll of linked stories 1990) – published by his own firm, Digithurst, Ltd – adroitly examines issues of Perception through three stories, which each describe the same events as radically transfigured by information-aged technologies just an instant ahead of the actual world of 1994; ...
Pollotta, Nick
Working name of US author Nicholas Angelo Pollotta (1954-2013), most of whose work in sf and other genres was under pseudonyms or House Names, including James Axler, Jack Hopkins and Don Pendleton, but who began publishing sf with Illegal Aliens (1989), with Phil Foglio providing extensive illustrations for this comic novel about a street gang in ...
Leviathan
Film (1989). Gordon Co./Filmauro. Directed by George P Cosmatos. Written by David Peoples and Jeb Stuart, based on a story by Peoples. Cast includes Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays and Peter Weller. 98 minutes. Colour. / One of several undersea-Alien movies of the period, Leviathan most resembles (and improves on) Deepstar Six (1988), especially in the near-identical finale. In this efficiently scary but routine ...
Television Anthology Series
The Television anthology series, with each segment presenting a new genre story or adaptation of some existing story, has frequently been attempted with varying degrees of success. The term is also applied to the format in which a regular slot with its own title hosts multiple series or serials, as with Cliffhangers (1979) below. Series which receive full or cross-reference entries in this encyclopedia are, in chronological order: / ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...