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Friday 12 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Mutations
Film (1973). Getty Picture Corp/Columbia. Directed by Jack Cardiff. Written by Robert D Weinbach, Edward Mann. Cast includes Tom Baker, Michael Dunn, Julie Ege and Donald Pleasence. 92 minutes. Colour. / In this scientifically ludicrous UK film a Mad Scientist (Pleasence) attempts to combine plant with animal life, aided by the dwarf owner of a carnival freak-show (Dunn), who obtains human guinea-pigs for his experiments and exhibits the results. Tom ...
Kemp, Randall H
(1852-1914) US field mineralogist from 1890 or earlier on expeditions in Pacific Rim states of America, and author of A Half-Breed Dance and Other Far Western Stories: Mining Camp, Indian and Hudson's Bay Tales Based on the Experiences of the Author (coll 1909), which contains two tales of interest: "Underneath Spokane" features a virtual Hollow Earth of underground caverns; and in the Lost World described in "The ...
Rosendorfer, Herbert
(1934-2012) Italian-born lawyer, judge, painter, composer, playwright, screenwriter and author, in Germany between 1943 and 1997; he served as a judge in Munich 1967-1993, and in other judicial positions. His early novel, Der Ruinenbaumeister (1969; trans Mike Mitchell as The Architect of Ruins 1992), complexly and ambivalently inserts its narrator into an Underground world, shaped like a vast cigar as though it were a gigantified ...
Bringsværd, Tor Åge
(1939-2025) Norwegian author and playwright. Born in the small town of Skien, Bringsværd moved to Oslo to attend university, and there in 1966 met Jon Bing at the first official meeting of the Oslo University sf club, Aniara, created by the initiative of Oddvar Foss; they later contributed by reading aloud stories they had translated. They were both inveterate sf readers in a country where sf literally did not exist, and decided to ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...