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Saturday 11 April 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.
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Italian prog-rock band formed in 1972, who mastered a near-chaotic jazz-rock fusion style that many find musically sophisticated, although it may baffle others. Their work is characterized by a Marxist-Leninist perspective on the failures of western capitalism that was uncompromising, and sometimes incomprehensible – the original vocalist Demetrios Stratos (1945-1979) sang in Italian, in Arabic, in his native Greek and sometimes in a spontaneous gibberish of yawps and growls. ...
Red Planet Mars
Film (1952). Melaby Pictures/United Artists. Directed by Harry Horner. Written by John L Balderston and Anthony Veiller, based on the play Red Planet (produced in New York in late 1932; 1933 chap) by Balderston and John E Hoare. Cast includes Peter Graves, Andrea King and Marvin Miller. 87 minutes. Black and white. / Two young US Scientists, the married couple Chris Cronyn (Graves) and Linda Cronyn ...
Comets
Small, normally icy bodies of our solar system whose appearance during close approach to the Sun can be spectacular owing to heating and outgassing effects producing the coma (a visible local atmosphere surrounding the central nucleus) and long tail of dust and gas blown outward from the sun by the Solar Wind. Owing to this visibility and the regular return of short-period comets – whose home is in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit ...
Lea, Alec Richard
(1907-2003) Canadian-born author, in UK from childhood; the protagonists of The Outward Urge (1944) protagonists escape a Near Future totalitarian Dystopia via Time Travel to a better land, inhabited by Druids. [JC]
Perry, Elaine
(1959- ) US author of a Near Future sf novel, Another Present Era (1990), set in an Entropic New York just as the lights go out, leaving the female protagonist alone (see Horror in SF) in an abandoned skyscraper as the rising waters, generated by global warming (see Climate Change), begin to engulf her ...
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 ...