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Saturday 11 April 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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Counter-Earth
An imagined extra planet of our own solar system, supposedly sharing Earth's orbit but always concealed from observation by its position on the far side of the Sun (that is, at or near the L3 Lagrange Point of the Earth-Sun system). The concept is ancient: Pythagoras proposed both the world, which he called Antichthon, and the mechanism of its concealment in the fifth century BCE. Although Counter-Earth – or ...
Halpern, Marty
(? - ) US editor of several genre Anthologies, beginning with The Silver Gryphon (anth 2003) with Gary Turner. Further titles are Witpunk: Stories with Attitude (anth 2003) with Claude Lalumière, the Fermi Paradox-themed Is Anybody Out There? (anth 2010) with Nick Gevers, ...
Flight to Mars
Film (1951). Monogram. Directed by Lesley Selander. Written by Arthur Strawn. Cast includes Morris Ankrum, Robert Barrat, Marguerite Chapman and Cameron Mitchell. 72 minutes. Colour. / A team of astronauts, including journalist Steve Abbott (Mitchell), embarks upon the first flight to Mars. After an encounter with meteors, they land on Mars and discover a race of humanoid Martians who live underground because the surface of Mars has become uninhabitable to ...
Son of Kong
Film (1933). RKO. Directed by Ernest B Schoedsack. Written by Ruth Rose. Cast includes Robert Armstrong, Noble Johnson, Helen Mack and Frank Reicher. 70 minutes. Black and white. / This film was made immediately after King Kong (1933) as a small-scale sequel. The hero returns to Skull Island and discovers Kong's son "Little Kong", a 20ft (6m) white ape with all the characteristics of a friendly puppy. Various prehistoric ...
Malzieu, Mathias
(1974- ) French singer – he is lead singer of the French band Dionysos – and author whose novel, La mécanique du coeur (2007; trans Sarah Ardizzone as The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart 2009), is fantasticated out of Steampunk tropes: an infant, born in Scotland in 1874 in savagely cold weather, has a frozen heart, which is replaced on the spot by a cuckoo clock. When he reaches adolescence, ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...