SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
My Stepmother Is an Alien
Film (1988). Weintraub/A Franklin R Levy/Ronald Parker Production/Catalina. Directed by Richard Benjamin. Written by Jericho Weingrod, Herschel Weingrod, Timothy Harris, Jonathan Reynolds. Cast includes Dan Aykroyd, Kim Basinger and Alyson Hannigan. 108 minutes. Colour. / This charmless and leaden-footed Sex comedy tells of an Alien woman (Basinger), fully human in appearance, who comes to Earth to learn the operation of a ...
Pocket Comics
US Comic 1941-1942. Alfred Harvey. Four issues. Artists include Al Avison, Louis Cazeneuve, Al Gabriele, Bob Powell and Pierce Rice. Scriptwriters include Eando Binder, Alfred Harvey, Art Helfant and Major Ralston. Each issue was 100 pages, digest sized; they carried eight long strips, as well as a few 1-2 page humorous ones, plus a couple of text stories. / The comic's most overtly sf strip was The Red Blazer. Having ...
Orcutt, Emma Louise
(? -? ) US author of a Lost Race novel, The Divine Seal (1909), which begins, unusually, somewhere in the distant future, after geological upheavals have brought Atlantis back to the surface; the discovery there of ancient tablets tells of an even more ancient race, the Zallallah, the entrance to whose Underground world is at the North Pole; the ...
Hovenden, Robert
UK author, most probably Robert Meyrick Hovenden (circa 1809-1885), who published various books 1844-1876. Of sf interest is an unfictionalized Future History, A Tract of Future Times [for subtitle see Checklist] (1851), told as though written after 1950 and giving an accounting of the previous era, concentrating on the last fifty years of the nineteenth century, espousing a kind of benevolently anarchic ...
Bijo to Ekitai-ningen
Film (1958; vt The H-Man; vt Beautiful Women and the Hydrogen Man). Toho. Director Ishirō Honda. Written by Takeshi Kimura, based on a story by Hideo Kaijo. Cast includes Akihiko Hirata, Kenji Sahara, Koreya Senda and Yumi Shirakawa. 87 minutes, cut to 79 minutes. Colour. / This Japanese film is, coincidentally, similar to The Blob (also 1958) but is more ingenious and sinister. Fishermen examining a drifting freighter ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book ...