SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 12 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 11 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Invasion: Earth [tv]
UK tv series (1998). BBC co-production with the Sci Fi Channel. Created, written and co-produced by Jed Mercurio. Directed by Patrick Lau and Richard Laxton. Cast includes Anton Lesser, Maggie O'Neill, Vincent Regan and Fred Ward. Six 50-minute episodes. Colour. / The Blitz, 1944: Lieutenant Charles Tyrell (Lesser) leads a UK bomb disposal squad that finds a crashed UFO containing two obvious Aliens. One is shot and Tyrell makes ...
Hardcore Henry
Film (2015 Russia; original title Khardkor). Huayi Brothers Pictures, Bazelevs, Versus Pictures. Directed by Ilya Naishuller. Written by Ilya Naishuller. Cast includes Haley Bennett, Sharlto Copley, Andrei Dementiev, Danila Kozlovsky, Tim Roth. 96 minutes. Colour. / The Cyborg "Henry" escapes from the laboratory where he was created, dropping from an Airship into the streets of Moscow. There, he joins forces with ...
Friel, Arthur O
(1885-1959) US author and explorer, most of whose work appeared in Pulp magazines, including the McKay, Knowlton and Ryan sequence of Lost Race tales set in South America and featuring the exploits of Americans, who eventually establish a kingdom somewhere close to Peru, their central base being in ancient ruins left by a mysterious white race. Those published as books – The Pathless Trail (10 October-10 November 1921 ...
Fly, The
1. Film (1958). Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Kurt Neumann. Written by James Clavell, based on "The Fly" (June 1957 Playboy) by George Langelaan. Cast includes Al (David) Hedison, Patricia Owens and Vincent Price. 94 minutes. Colour. / A Scientist experimenting with Matter Transmission accidentally gets mixed with a fly and ends up with ...
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 ...