SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Wise, Arthur
(1923-1983) UK drama consultant and author, most of whose works were thrillers; he also wrote as by John McArthur and under the non-sf house name Bryan Swift. Most of his sf was borderline, using genre elements to heighten the suspense. The best known of these tales was probably The Day the Queen Flew to Scotland for the Grouse Shooting (1968), about the abduction of the monarch in the context of a breakup of the United Kingdom. A second ...
Rollerball
1. Film (1975). United Artists. Directed by Norman Jewison. Written by William Neal Harrison, based on his "Roller Ball Murder" (September 1973 Esquire). Cast includes Maud Adams, John Beck, James Caan and John Houseman. 129 minutes, cut to 125 minutes. Colour. / That one man who stands tall and proud can topple a corrupt system by his example is the moral of this sluggish big-budget movie. In a future run by corporations, ...
Nonstop Magazine
US Semiprozine published and edited by K J Cypret from New York, with Luis Ortiz as art director. It only saw three printed issues, all far apart, Winter 1993, Winter 1995 and Spring 1997. The first two were letter-size and the third review size, with a title change to Nonstop Science Fiction Magazine; the never-completed fourth issue was released in digital (PDF) form only in October 2013, along with digital reissues of the first three. Nonstop was ...
Richmond, Charles
(? - ) UK author whose sf play, A Step into Infinity (1946 chap), set half-a millennium hence, depicts the end of a vast Future War on Earth, and more cheering events on the planet Xeres. [JC]
Besher, Alexander
(1951-2020) China-born, Japanese-raised US author, editor and journalist who published a posthumous edition of David Lindsay's tales as The Violet Apple & The Witch (1976) in his Chicago Review Press, and who began to publish sf in English (some stories had appeared in Japanese) with his Rim cycle, comprising Rim: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1994), Mir: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1998) and Chi ...
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 ...