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Wednesday 20 May 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 18 May 2026
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Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The
Film (1970). United Artists and the Mirisch Production Company presents a Sir Nigel Films and Mirisch Films production in association with Compton Films, Phalanx Productions and the Mirisch Corporation. Directed by Billy Wilder. Written by Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond, based on characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Cast includes Colin Blakely, Christopher Lee, Mollie Maureen, Genevieve Page, Robert Stephens and Tamara Toumanova. 125 minutes ...
Machinarium
Videogame (2009). Amanita Design. Designed by Jakub Dvorský. Platforms: Lin, Mac, Win (2009); iOS, Phone (2011). / Machinarium is a graphical Adventure, developed as an Independent Game and set in a fairytale "City of Robots". As in such earlier works as Another World (1991), a broadly linear ...
Yates, Frances A
(1899-1981) UK academic and author, active from the mid-1920s, associated with the Warburg Institute from 1941 until her death. Her influence on sf has been indirect, though her ideas and discoveries have had a pervasive influence on authors of Fantastika in general, notably including John Crowley and Gene Wolfe (see Memory). Beginning with her first full-length ...
Coatsworth, J Scott
(? - ) US author much of whose output has been concentrated on various subseries in his Liminal Sky sequence of Space Operas, whose gay protagonists engagingly explore themselves, the worlds they encounter, and find romance (see Sex). The first of these, the Ariadne Cycle beginning with The Stark Divide (2017), focuses on three ...
Quinn, Seabury
(1889-1969) American lawyer and weird-fiction author whose first published story was "The Law of the Movies" (December 1917 The Motion Picture Magazine). Seabury Quinn was by far the most prolific contributor to Weird Tales; during its 31-year life he published well over a hundred stories there, appearing on average in roughly every other issue. Many of these contributions – 93 in all – featured his occult detective Jules de Grandin ...
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 ...