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Saturday 12 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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Ishinomori Shōtarō
Working name of Shōtarō Onodera (1938-1998), Shōtarō Ishimori to 1986, Ishinomori thereafter, a prolific Japanese comic artist with a profound influence on both Anime and live-action Television in the twentieth century, particularly in the children's market. His collected Manga works, Ishinomori Shōtarō Manga Zenshū ["The Complete '10,000 ...
Cecil, Henry
Pseudonym of Henry Cecil Leon (1902-1976), UK barrister and later County Court judge who wrote numerous witty, legally knowledgable stories, generally revolving around courtrooms, ingenious crimes, eccentric lawyers and unreliable witnesses. The most famous is Brothers in Law (1955), which was filmed in 1957. His first work of genre interest seems to be the brief and flippant ghost story, "Proof" (April 1964 Argosy UK), collected in ...
Rickman, Gregg
(? - ) US author and critic who conducted illuminating Interviews with Philip K Dick – one late magazine appearance being "Piper in the Woods" (November 1990 Argosy) – and has published three volumes of this material, beginning with Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words (1984; rev 1988). The third of these, ...
Asteroids
The asteroids (or minor planets) mostly lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The first to be discovered was Ceres, identified by Giuseppe Piazzi (1746-1826) in 1801; three more, including Vesta and Pallas, were discovered in the same decade, and hundreds of thousands have now been catalogued. Only a few are over 150 km (100 miles) in diameter, the largest – Ceres, classified since 2006 as a dwarf planet rather than an asteroid ...
Ranzetta, Luan
Pseudonym of Valerie Ranzetta (? -? ), author of several routine sf adventures focusing on Alien Invasions, great Disasters and crises in Spaceships; they include The Uncharted Planet (1961) as V Ranzetta, The Maru Invasion: Turmoil and Destruction on Earth (1962), The World in Reverse (1962), ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...