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Saturday 7 February 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.
Site updated on 6 February 2026
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Sallis, James
(1944-2026) US musician, poet and author, briefly active in New Worlds during its Michael Moorcock-directed New-Wave phase; he began to publish work of genre interest in this context with "Kazoo" (August 1967 New Worlds) and co-edited the magazine 1968-1969. His clearly acknowledged models in the French avant garde and the gnomic brevity of much of his work ...
Swyler, Erika
(1975- ) US playwright and author whose Book of Speculation sequence beginning with The Book of Speculation (2015) which, in a manner evocative of James P Blaylock's exercises in Pacific-Rim Magic Realism, Equipoises a fantasy-based tale of doom attending an old house half-awash in the rising seas of Long Island (New York), with hints that ...
Prisons
Scenarios of future Crime and Punishment frequently include prison facilities, ranging from mild extrapolation of present-day institutions to highly exotic variants from which escape is theoretically impossible but nevertheless often takes place. Influential nonfantastic precursors of sf prisons, featuring just such more or less remarkable breakouts, include the real-world, Island-based Château d'If of Alexandre ...
Captain Video
1. US tv serial (1949-1953 and 1955-1956). DuMont. Produced by Larry Menkin. DuMont was a New York television company; in the early years of television many programmes came from New York. Captain Video, a 30-minute children's programme that went out five nights a week, was the first sf on television. Written by Maurice Brockhauser, it starred Richard Coogan (replaced in 1950 by Al Hodge) as Captain Video, who 300 years from now, with the aid of his Video Rangers, battled various ...
Untamed Women
Film (1952). Jewell Enterprises, Inc/United Artists. Produced by Richard Kay. Directed by W Merle Connell. Written by George Wallace Sayre. Cast includes Mikel Conrad, Doris Merrick and Lyle Talbot. 70 minutes. Black and white. / During World War Two, US Air Force Officer Steven Holloway (Conrad) is found drifting on a raft in the Pacific ocean, in a weakened condition. In hospital Holloway is injected with a truth Drug by ...
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 ...