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Thursday 10 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
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Ray, René
Pseudonym of UK actor and author Irene Creese (1911-1993), in whose sf novel, The Strange World of Planet X (1957), romance and a Mad Scientist becomes mixed with the fourth Dimension. It was written to novelize her own television series, The Strange World of Planet X, although there are differences in plot, which differences are replicated in the 1958 film ...
Maddock, Reginald
(1912-1994) UK author, mostly for Young Adult readers. His first sf novel, The Time Maze (1960), is a literate Time Travel tale whose protagonists, lost in a mysterious cave, find that its innumerable luminescent passages take them to exemplary experiences in three past eras: the time of the Dinosaurs, of Neanderthal man, and in a Neolithic community. Unusually, it is women not men who ...
Video Watchdog
US saddle-stapled Digest-size Cinema magazine. Published and edited by Donna and Tim Lucas. Summer 1990-2016. A bimonthly schedule was generally adhered to. / The heart of Video Watchdog as a Media Magazine was from the first its extended reviews of film and Television releases in video or, subsequently, DVD and other formats; existing films or television in ...
Vernon, Roger Lee
(1924-2017) US schoolteacher and author whose awkwardly routine early sf is contained in an assemblage of original stories, The Space Frontiers (coll 1955), which are mostly Space Opera tales of interplanetary warfare; and the novel Robot Hunt (1959) (see Robots). The very much more recent The Fall of the American Empire – 2013: A Remembrance of Things Future (2010) is told from the year ...
Shadow Men, The
Film (1997). Promark Entertainment Group and Spectacor Films. Directed by Timothy Bond. Written by Eric Miller, Justin Stanley. Cast includes Sherilyn Fenn, Eric Roberts and Dean Stockwell. 91 minutes. Colour. / A drab, low-budget dramatization of the Men in Black (see UFOs) mythology, The Shadow Men plays like a mediocre X-Files (1993-2002) episode expanded to feature length. An American family is abducted by a ...
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 ...