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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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Man Without a Body, The
UK film (1957). Filmplays Ltd. Directed by W Lee Wilder and Charles Saunders. Written by William Grote. Cast includes Julia Arnall, George Coulouris, Michael Golden, Robert Hutton, Sheldon Lawrence and Nadja Regin. 78 minutes. Black and white. / New York business mogul Karl Brussard (Coulouris) learns that his recent health problems – loss of memory (see Amnesia) and delusions – are due to an inoperable brain tumour. However, his doctor has ...
Bradbury, Ray
(1920-2012) US screenwriter, poet and author; in 1934 his father, a power lineman who was having trouble gaining employment in Michigan during the Depression, moved with the family to Los Angeles; memories and images of southern California would be central to Bradbury's work, though the small-town Midwest always remained important in his stories. Bradbury discovered sf Fandom in 1937, meeting Ray ...
Roberts, Gareth
(1968- ) UK author of several Ties to the Doctor Who universe, beginning with Doctor Who: The New Adventures: The Highest Science (1993) in the Doctor Who: The New Adventures subseries, and continuing with Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures: The Romance of Crime (1995) in the Doctor Who: Missing Adventures subseries and Doctor Who: New Series: Only Human (2005) ...
Key, Frank
Pseudonym of UK author and broadcaster Paul Byrne (1959-2019), whose early work appeared as limited-edition pamphlets – often self-illustrated – from the London-based Malice Aforethought Press which he co-founded in 1986 with Maxim Décharné (also published by the press). The first to be of genre interest, if tangentially, is perhaps Forty Visits to the Worm Farm (1987 chap). Key's stories tend towards surrealism and ...
Finney, Charles G
(1905-1984) US newspaperman and author – named after but apparently not related to the famous revivalist minister, Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) – who spent the years 1927-1929 with the US infantry in Tientsin, China; an oriental influence pervades most of his work. His novels and stories, though Fantasy rather than sf, have been influential throughout the field, especially his famous The Circus of Dr Lao (1935), filmed less than ...
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 ...