SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 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.
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Paul
Film (2011). Columbia Pictures in association with Relativity Media presents a Working Title/Big Talk production. Directed by Gregg Motola. Written by Frost and Pegg. Cast includes Jason Bateman, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Seth Rogen (voice), Sigourney Weaver and Kristen Wiig. 104 minutes. Colour. / Two British sf fans on a US road trip from Comic-Con via the UFO trail pick up a sweary, wisecracking Roswell Alien newly escaped from ...
Wright, Alexis
(1950- ) Australian author, a member of the indigenous Waanyi nation whose homeland stretches along the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia; she has been associated for many years with various campaigns advocating the rights of Aboriginals. Her first two novels, Plains of Promise (1997) and Carpentaria (2006), both acutely but compassionately polemical, address her people and the life that has been imposed upon them. Though technically ...
Beyer, William Gray
(? -? ) US policeman and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Let 'Em Eat Space" as by William Grey Beyer in Argosy for 4 November 1930. Most of his sf first appeared in the same magazine, with the exception of a 1951 story in Science Fiction Quarterly bylined Wm Gray Beyer. His Minions of the Moon (22 April-6 May 1939 Argosy; ...
Maugham, Robin
Working name of UK author Robert Cecil Romer Maugham (1916-1981), W Somerset Maugham's nephew; he is best known for a nonfantastic novel, The Servant (1948). His first publication, The 1946 Ms. (1943 chap), describes a Dystopian dictatorship founded, after the end of World War Two, by the British general responsible for defeating Hitler. [JC]
Smith, Clark Ashton
(1893-1961) US sculptor and author, of primary interest for his tales of Science Fantasy and horror (see Horror in SF); the rich style (sometimes idiomatic, sometimes "jewelled" in the early Lord Dunsany manner) and baroque invention of this work did much to transform the interplanetary romance of the early years of the century into the full-fledged Post-World War Two ...
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 ...