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Tuesday 8 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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Snell, Edmund
(1889-1972) UK author, prolific between the Wars, specializing in thrillers (often with Oriental villains) and mysteries. The Yu-Chi Stone (1925) is a Lost Race adventure set in Borneo; The White Owl (1930), on the other hand, involves an ancient Toltec curse which is activated from an ancient temple and causes its victims to commit terrible crimes. Snell's sf normally focuses on Mad Scientists and ...
Struzan, Drew
(1947- ) US artist who first studied his craft at the ArtCenter College of Design, then located in Los Angeles, California. He was first employed as a staff artist at the design studio Pacific Eye & Ear, producing many music album covers, but became better known for film posters. Early work in this area included posters for the H G Wells-based Food of the Gods (1976) and ...
Alphaville
Film (1965; vt Une Étrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution). Pathé-contemporary/Chaumiane-Film Studio. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Written by Godard and Paul Éluard. Cast includes Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff and Howard Vernon. 100 minutes. Black and white. / In this archetypal French New Wave film, intergalactic secret agent Lemmy Caution (Constantine) arrives at Alphaville – a City on a distant planet – ...
Hamit, Francis
(1944- ) US screenwriter, journalist, playwright and author, in the U S Army Security Agency in the 1960s, multiply active from the middle of that decade. Several nonfantastic novels precede his first sf novel, Starmen (2024), which examines the artefactual nature of the American West as mythologized in the Western. Under the command of a mysterious woman, a giant Balloon carrying British ...
Muse
UK rock band, formed in Devon by frontman Matthew Bellamy (1978- ). The group favours a bombastic and indeed deliberately melodramatic musical style, guitar-based but augmented with many other instruments, amplified and overdriven to sometimes preposterous levels. The group's songs, often science-fictional, are conveyed in Bellamy's distinctive voice, stronger at the top-end and with a wailing falsetto. This is a musical mixture that works well with grandiose or ...
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 ...