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Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Matter Transmission
The matter transmitter is one of sf's many facilitating devices for Transportation: a hypothetical machine which is not rationally plausible in terms of known science (at least at any macroscopic scale) but which is very convenient for certain narrative purposes (see Imaginary Science). By virtue of an obvious play on words, matter transmitters were sometimes called "transmats" – as in Lan ...
Monsters from the Vault
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema Semiprozine printed on high-quality paper. Published by Jim and Marian Clatterbaugh with Steve Kronenberg. Editor: Jim Clatterbaugh. 34 issues from 1995 to 2015 plus one Special Edition. Publication schedule: biannual. / This publication strove to focus on the vintage mode of Horror and sf films from the 1930s to the 1950s rather than their modern gore or ...
Nasir, Jamil
(1955- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Darkness Beyond" for Aboriginal Science Fiction (May-June 1988); his first novel, Quasar (1995), establishes a sometimes foggy relationship between lucid dream states and the external Perception (and manipulation) of reality. As usual in tales of this sort, Metaphysics tends to complicate ...
Benoit, M D
(1957- ) Canadian author whose Jack Meter sequence beginning with Metered Space: A Jack Meter Case File (2004) features a slightly cackhandedly hardboiled noir detective in a Near Future world where a propensity to attract Aliens with problems persuades him to make use of a Teleportation device (perhaps more simply a ...
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 ...