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Friday 13 March 2026
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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Quiet Earth, The
Film (1985). Cinepro/Pillsbury. Directed by Geoffrey Murphy. Written by Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence, Sam Pillsbury, based on The Quiet Earth (1981) by Craig Harrison. Cast includes Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge and Peter Smith. 91 minutes. Colour. / This New Zealand film tells of a scientific/metaphysical Disaster, perhaps consequent upon a secret project in energy transmission, in which all people ...
Corston, George
(1932- ) UK author of Aftermath (1968), an exceedingly grim vision of England after a nuclear Disaster that has driven what remains of the land into martial law and useless defiance of the inevitable; the protagonist, cursing his fate, dies of leukaemia. It is the case that, as with this title, surprisingly unconventional tales sometimes slipped into the Robert Hale Limited list, which ...
London
As the City at the heart of the British Empire (see Imperialism), London was long seen by UK speculative authors as bearing the brunt of whatever Disaster the future might bring. There are many proleptic post-imperial visions of London destroyed or depopulated, as in William Delisle Hay's ...
McCullough, Kelly
(1967- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "WebMage" in Weird Tales for Fall 1999, a tale which was expanded into Webmage (2006), the first of the Equipoisal WebMage sequence which continues with Cybermancy (2007), CodeSpell (2008) and MythOS (2009). The sequence – set in a kind of ...
Fortress
Film (1992, but released 1993). Fortress Films/Village Roadshow Pictures/Davis Entertainment Production. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Steve Feinberg, Troy Neighbors. Cast includes Jeffrey Combs, Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Christopher Lambert, Loryn Locklin, Kurtwood Smith, Tom Towles and Vernon Wells. 95 minutes. Colour. / In a Near-Future and apparently semi-fascist USA it is ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...