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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
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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 ...
Szilárd, Leó
(1898-1964) Hungarian-born physicist and author, in the USA from 1937, whose The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories (coll 1961) was published late in his celebrated career as a nuclear physicist who had been involved in the creation of the Manhattan Project. Several of these sf stories were written in the 1940s; one of these, "My Trial as a War Criminal" (Fall 1949 University of Chicago Law Review), is an early expression of the deep and often hidden fears of the ...
Hydrozagadka
["Hydro-Mystery"] Film (1971). Zespół Filmowy Plan. Directed by Andrzej Kondratiuk. Written by Andrzej Bonarski and Andrzej Kondratiuk. Cast includes Iga Cembrzyńska, Roman Kłosowski, Zdzisław Maklakiewicz, Wiesław Michnikowski and Józef Nowak. 70 minutes. Black and white. / Hydro-Mystery uses the Superhero genre as a vehicle for Satire. Shot in 1970 and released in 1971, the ...
Cordasco, Rachel S
(1982- ) US independent scholar and translator focusing on SF in Translation (henceforth SFT). Cordasco earned a PhD in Literary Studies in 2010; after working as a lecturer and then editor for several years, she transitioned into independent writing, first reviewing SFT for John DeNardo's SF Signal. In May 2016, Cordasco launched SFinTranslation.com, a site dedicated to cataloguing and promoting ...
Weiss, Sara
(? -1904) US author of the Ento sequence comprising Journeys to the Planet Mars (1903) and Decimon Hûŷdas: A Romance of Mars (1906) [for further data on both titles see Checklist below]; Sara Weiss herself reports, via psychic messages, on the Utopia flourishing on Mars centuries previous, including advanced forms of Transportation (such as the ...
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 ...