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Monday 17 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Hall, Owen
Pseudonym of UK-born politician and author Hugh H Lusk (1838-1926), in New Zealand and Australia most of his life; not to be confused with Owen Hall, the pseudonym under which UK theatre critic James Davis (1853-1907) wrote plays. Along with some supernatural tales, Hall is of interest for a Lost Race tale, Eureka (1899), whose scholarly protagonists proceed, via the perusal of ancient documents, to the discovery of a hidden ...
Matango
Japanese film (1963; vt Attack of the Mushroom People; vt Fungus of Terror). Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Written by Takeshi Kimura, based on William Hope Hodgson's story "The Voice in the Night" (November 1907 Blue Book Magazine). Special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. Cast includes Hiroshi Koizumi, Akira Kubo, Kumi Mizuno, ...
Astronaut's Wife, The
Film (1999). New Line Cinema/Mad Chance. Directed and written by Rand Ravich. Cast includes Nick Cassavetes, Johnny Depp, Samantha Eggar, Clea Duvall, Joe Morton, Donna Murphy, Charlize Theron. 109 minutes. Colour. / There is little to say about the sad schizophrenic gap between the competent flow of Rand Ravich's direction of The Astronaut's Wife and the lame Cliché-ridden retro-bondage that slowly hamstrings the actual story. This slow ...
Kelly, Richard
(1975- ) US filmmaker, son of a NASA physicist based in Langley, Virginia whose home and workplace are recreated in Kelly's third feature The Box (2009). As a young film-school graduate he attracted attention initially as a screenwriter of edgy left-field comedy; an early commission was an unused 1999 script for the adaptation of Louis Sachar's Holes, which took a notably darker spin on the book than the 2003 film. A ...
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 ...