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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.
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Wise, Robert
(1914-2005) US film director, who began his career as a film-cutter at RKO Studios and by 1939 was a fully qualified editor. He worked on Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and also – at the studio's insistence when the director was safely out of the country – directed a few scenes in Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). He then worked with the Val Lewton unit at RKO, first as editor, then as director. He made three ...
Marshall, Peyton
(1972- ) US author active since the early 2000s, her short work being exclusively nonfantastic. Her first novel, Goodhouse (2014), though its plot adheres to the dominant Near Future Young Adult Dystopia model, is written with a fluent literary intensity that lifts it from some of the constraints implied by its literal obedience to genre conventions. The young ...
Calmadenker, A
Pseudonym of Dutch-born author, born Jacobus Calisch (1863-1926), a resident in the USA apparently from early adulthood; he changed his name to James Howard Calish in 1906. In his The Mania of the Nations on the Planet Mars, and its Terrific Consequences: A Combination of Fun and Wisdom (1915 chap), tantalizingly, the history of Mars – here narrated at length via an access platform sited at the South Pole (see ...
Mills, Robert E
(1938- ) US author, mostly of Westerns, who began writing sf with the Fellowship of Light Space Opera sequence, comprising Star Quest (1978), Star Fighters (1978) and Star Force (1978), in which the Fellowship of Light (which is good) saves the galaxy from the Death Legion (which is not). Under the Eye of Night (1980) is a novel of the occult. ...
Nichols, Nichelle
Working name of US singer, dancer and actor Grace Dell Nichols (1932-2022), best known for her role as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek (1966-1969) series and its very many spinoffs. Her first venture into genre fiction was the novelette "Surprise!" with Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak in Star Trek: The New Voyages 2 (anth 1978) edited by Culbreath and ...
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 ...