SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 23 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Rall, Ted
(1963- ) US author of a Graphic Novel, 2024 (graph 2001), a Satire of Near Future corporate America – here known as Canamexicusa – explicitly using George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as its model. Moments of Orwellian hectic intensity, in this case, tend to explode into spoof. [JC]
Mission to Mars
Film (2000). Touchstone Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company). Directed by Brian De Palma. Written by Jim Thomas, John Thomas and Graham Yost from a story by the two Thomases and Lowell Cannon. Cast includes Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen, Jerry O'Connell, Tim Robbins and Gary Sinise. 109 minutes. Colour. / Pseudo-mystical silliness – which owes not a little to Stanley Kubrick's ...
Moore, Fiona
(1974- ) Canadian academic and author, in the UK from before 2005; in her nonfiction she specializes in the "international business", and is Professor of Business Anthropology in the University of London (see Anthropology).. She is of sf interest initially for nonfiction studies in Television series, beginning with Liberation: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Blake's 7 (2003) with Alan ...
Schwartz, Helen Ruth
(? - ) US author whose sf novel, The Meadowlark Sings (2006), is set in a Near Future Dystopian America governed by the fundamentalist right whose homophobia (see Sex) is given teeth by the discovery of the "Scarpetta gene", which causes homosexuality. When in 2018 an earthquake calves off part of California, which becomes an ...
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 ...