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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
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Le Plongeon, Alice Dixon
(1851-1910) UK photographer, traveller, amateur archaeologist and author who, with her husband Augustus Le Plongeon (1826-1908), spent from 1873 to 1885 in Mexico and South America, photographing still-extant ruins (over 2000 negatives, held in various archives, have survived); and suggesting on a Eurocentric diffusionist model that the pre-Columbian civilizations of America were copies of the civilization of Atlantis. Her interest in ...
Astronaut, The
Made-for-tv film (1972). Universal Television for ABC-TV. Produced by Harve Bennett. Directed by Robert Michael Lewis. Written by Gerald Di Pego, Charles Kuenstle and Richard Biheller from an original story by Kuenstle and Biheller. Cast includes Richard Anderson, Walter Brooke, Susan Clark, Jackie Cooper, Robert Lansing, Monte Markham and James Sikking. 73 minutes. Colour. / In 1981, the first US two-man mission to Mars ends in tragedy when the astronaut who ...
Dying Earth
A not uncommon category of sf story which has now developed its own melancholy mythology. Since the Sun is invariably moribund if not extinguished, this could also be called the dying-sun theme. Jack Vance gave this Far Future subgenre its name in The Dying Earth (coll of linked stories 1950). Important precursors are the section of H G Wells's ...
Dead Kids
Film (1981; vt Strange Behavior). Endeavour/Bannon Glenn/Hemdale. Directed by Michael Laughlin. Written by Laughlin, William Condon. Cast includes Arthur Dignam, Louise Fletcher, Fiona Lewis, Michael Murphy and Dan Shor. 99 minutes, cut to 93 minutes. Colour. / This Australian/New Zealand exploitation sf/Horror movie is set in the US Midwest and has a largely US cast, but was actually shot in New Zealand. It is the first of a projected trilogy ...
Grimwade, Peter
(1942-1990) UK Television director and author, most closely associated in various capacities with Doctor Who; even his one non-Tied novel, Robot (1987), is dependent on the Doctor Who universe, for which he also wrote three Ties: Doctor Who – Time-Flight (1983), Doctor Who – Mawdryn Undead (1983) and ...
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 ...