SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
No Escape
Film (1994; vt Penal Colony; vt The Prison Colony; vt Escape From Absalom). Pacific Western/Allied Filmmakers/Columbia Tristar. Produced by Gale Ann Hurd. Directed by Martin Campbell. Written by Michael Gaylin, Joel Gross, based on The Penal Colony (1987) by Richard Herley. Cast includes Kevin Dillon, Don Henderson, Lance Henriksen, Ernie Hudson, Michael Lerner, Ray Liotta, Ian McNeice, Kevin J O'Conner, Jack Shepherd ...
Two Lost Worlds
Film (1951). Sterling Productions, Inc. Produced by Boris Petroff. Directed by Norman Dawn. Dinosaur stock footage by Roy Seawright from One Million B.C. (1940). Written by Tom Hubbard from a story by Phyllis Parker and Boris Petroff (uncredited). Cast includes James Arness (credited as James Aurness), Bill Kennedy, Gloria Petroff, Kasey Rogers (credited as Laura Elliott) and Michael Rye (credited as Rye Billsbury). Narrator: Dan Riss. 61 ...
Catalan SF
Catalan is not just the language of Catalonia, but a language shared with other areas of Spain, France, and even Italy. Catalan is also the official language of Andorra, the small country set in the middle of the Pyrenees. Most Catalan speakers are bilingual, with Catalan being used as a first language by fewer than half of them. There is a certainly very solid literary tradition in Catalan, which includes a long list of sf works – among them an indispensable masterpiece, Manuel ...
Bell, Harry
(1947- ) UK civil servant (retired 1997) and artist, active in Fandom since 1965 though with occasional periods of silence. He has contributed cartoon artwork to many Fanzines including Ansible, Checkpoint, Maya, Robert Lichtman's Trap Door and Leroy Kettle's ...
Johnston, Bryan
(? - ) US screenwriter, producer and author; his sf novel Death Warrant (2022) unveils an homage to Robert Sheckley's The Tenth Victim (full version 1966) through its depiction of a young woman who agrees to be killed on a reality show (see Media Landscape; Television), but without knowing that a ...
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 ...