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Thursday 13 August 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.
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Woops!
Tv series (1996). Witt/Thomas Productions with Touchstone Television for Fox Network. Created by Gary Jacobs. Produced by Drew Brown and Gil Junger. Directed by Terry Hughes. Writers include Ross Abrash, Harold Kimmel and Mark Nutter. Cast includes Fred Applegate, Lane Davies, Cleavant Derricks, Meagen Fay, Marita Geraghty, Evan Handler. 13 25-minute episodes. Colour. / Children playing with a remote-controlled toy car somehow cause the accidental launch of a nuclear missile which ...
Brooke, Jocelyn
(1908-1966) UK journalist and author; during active service in World War Two, he worked as a pox wallah (a medical aide who concentrated on venereal diseases); he is most noted for psychological fantasias like The Scapegoat (1948) and The Goose Cathedral (1950). The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950) casts an Equipoisal sf hue over the extremities of psychological horror that follow its ...
Stephensen-Payne, Phil
(1952- ) UK bibliographer who regularly supplied UK publishing data to Locus from 1986 to the beginning of 1994, and who has compiled, often in collaboration with Gordon Benson Jr, a number of extremely useful "working Bibliographies" of sf writers, including Poul Anderson (with Benson), Brian W Aldiss, John ...
Binder, Eando
The most famous of the joint Pseudonyms used by the US author brothers Earl Andrew Binder (1904-1966), who was born in Austria-Hungary and came to the US in 1910, and Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1975), who was the more active (and ultimately better known) of the two; after approximately 1934, when Earl became inactive as a writer, Otto continued to sign himself Eando Binder, so that some Eando Binder books – they were all published after 1940; several contain ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book ...