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Tuesday 13 January 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 12 January 2026
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von Däniken, Erich
(1935-2026) Swiss author of a series of purportedly nonfiction books, beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968; trans Michael Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969), which, based on a mass of often suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was visited by at least one Alien spacefaring race before and at the dawn of historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid of ...
Quatermass and the Pit
1. UK tv serial (1958-1959). BBC TV. Produced and directed by Rudolph Cartier. Written Nigel Kneale. Cast includes Anthony Bushell, Christine Finn, Cec Linder, André Morell, Richard Shaw and Brian Worth. Six 35-minute episodes. Black and white. / As in Quatermass and the Pit's two predecessors, The Quatermass Experiment (1953) and ...
Bailey, Thomas
Pseudonym of US author Edward Bellamy Partridge (1877-1960), who wrote Country Lawyer (1939) under his full name, also publishing work as Bellamy Partridge and Bailey. In his Lost Race novel, Long Night (1935), a young woman, lost in the Arctic, is taken by the Inuit chief who rescues her to a mysterious Island where she finds a Viking still alive. The Viking and the Inuit fight over her. [JC]
Catfight
Film (2016). MPI Media, Dark Sky Films, Netflix. Directed by Onur Tukel. Written by Onur Tukel. Cast includes Anne Heche, Amy Hill, Ivana Milicevic, Sandra Oh, Alicia Silverstone and Myra Lucretia Taylor. 96 minutes. Colour. / College-day frenemies Veronica (Oh) and Ashley (Heche) are reunited at a party where Veronica's husband is celebrating a hugely profitable military clean-up contract for a forthcoming war in the Middle East. Ashley, a struggling artist, is serving drinks to ...
Cadigan, Pat
Working name of US author Patricia Oren Kearney Cadigan (1953- ), who began publishing sf with "Death from Exposure" for Shayol #2, February 1978; this Semiprozine, which she edited throughout its existence (1977-1985), was remarkable both for the quality of stories it published and for its production values. She later assembled much of her best shorter work in Patterns: Stories (coll 1989), where ...
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 ...