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Thursday 16 July 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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Dixon, Franklin W
Perhaps the most famous House Name of the Stratemeyer Syndicate (see Edward Stratemeyer), used by Leslie McFarlane for his contributions to the Hardy Boys sequence and by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and others; rare items of genre interest in this series include The Disappearing Floor (1940) by John ...
Choate, Pearson
(?1886-1960) UK author of some stories before World War One in Top-Notch and elsewhere, of the screenplay for Silas Q Pinch, Sensationalist (1914); and his sole sf novel, The King Who Went on Strike (1924), in which the newly crowned King Alfred the Second of the British Empire goes walkabout in an otherwise unaltered Near Future, and the threat of Communism looms. [JC]
Wellman, Bert J
(? -? ) US author of The Legal Revolution of 1902: By a Law-Abiding Revolutionist (1898), which describes, as its title argues, a slow Near Future revolution in America, climaxing around 1920 in the election of a president who represents the best hope for Utopia, and a solution to an issue which has continued to bedevil America in the early twenty-first century: capital-driven destruction ...
Nicholson, John H
(1838-1923) UK born schoolmaster and author, in Australia from 1859, who also published early work as by Tadberry Gilcobs and Salathiel Doles. He is of sf interest for The Adventures of Halek: An Autobiographical Fragment (1882; vt Halek: A Romance 1896; further vt Halek: A Romance: Companion of "Almoni" 1904) and its sequel, Almoni: Companion Volume to Halek (1904), which takes ...
Corpse Vanishes, The
US film (1942; vt The Case of the Missing Brides). Banner Productions. Directed by Wallace Fox. Written by Harvey Gates from a story by Sam Robins and Gerald Schnitzer. Cast includes Tristram Coffin, Bela Lugosi, Frank Moran, Angelo Rossitto, Elizabeth Russell, Minerva Urecal and Luana Walters. 63 minutes. Black and white. / As she says "I do," a bride collapses and is declared dead; the mortuary staff arrive, to be told the body has already ...
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 ...