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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 ...
Screen Thrills Illustrated
Letter-size Cinema magazine printed on newsprint-quality paper; early issues perfect-bound, later ones saddle-stapled. Publisher: Warren Publishing. Editor: Sam Sherman. Ten issues on a roughly quarterly schedule, June 1962 to November 1964. / This title was Warren Publishing's effort to establish a magazine devoted to general action films, including crime, war and western productions. There was a heavy emphasis on ...
Roddenberry, Gene
(1921-1991) US television scriptwriter, producer, director and creator of Star Trek. Roddenberry began writing in the late 1940s while working as a pilot for a commercial airline. In 1953 he sold his first television script and in 1956 his first that was sf, a genre in which he had not previously been particularly interested. In 1954 he became a full-time television writer. In 1963 he created and produced a series of his own – The Lieutenant – ...
Fantastic Films
Small Bedsheet-size Cinema Magazine printed on glossy paper; saddle-stapled. 46 issues from 1978 to 1985. Published in the USA by Blake Publications Corporation. Editor: Irving Karchmer. Publication schedule was nominally bimonthly, but issues appeared on a somewhat irregular basis. / One of the numerous sf film publications which appeared in the wake of the success of ...
Boyle, T Coraghessan
(1948- ) US author who sometimes signs his more recent work as T C Boyle; very much better known for his non-fantastic fiction – novels like World's End (1987) or The Road to Wellville (1993) – than for his relatively rare (and recent) sf. Several stories to be found in After the Plague: Stories (coll 2001) are of sf interest, including the Post-Holocaust title story, which is set ...
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 ...