SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Bed-Sitting Room, The
Film (1969). Oscar Lewenstein/United Artists. Director Richard Lester. Cast includes Peter Cook, Michael Hordern, Roy Kinnear, Arthur Lowe, Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham and Mona Washbourne. Written by John Antrobus from the play by Antrobus and Milligan. 91 minutes. Colour. / The Bed-sitting Room is a Fabulation, a ...
Jarvis, E K
Ziff-Davis House Name used 1942-1958 in Amazing, Fantastic Adventures and Fantastic for over 45 stories, primarily by Robert Moore Williams, who used the name as a personal pseudonym until the 1950s, when Robert Bloch, Paul W ...
Terrornauts, The
Film (1967). Amicus Productions. Directed by Montgomery Tully. Written by John Brunner, based on the novel The Wailing Asteroid (1960) by Murray Leinster. Cast includes Charles Hawtrey, Patricia Hayes, Zena Marshall, Stanley Meadows and Simon Oates. 75 minutes. Colour. / The head of a project to use a radio telescope to listen for signs of intelligent life, Dr Joe Burke (Oates), is rewarded for his ...
Shiel, M P
(1865-1947) Montserrat-born author with his surname given as Shiell, in the UK from around 1883. He began writing fiction in the late 1880s and continued intermittently until his death, his first work of genre interest being "Huguenin's Wife" for Pall Mall Magazine in April 1895; most of his short fiction of fantastic interest was published 1896-1901. Shiel was intensely concerned with style per se, incorporating poetic techniques into narrative ...
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 ...