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Wednesday 16 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.
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Lee, Fonda
(1979- ) Canadian author, in USA from early adulthood; her first novel, Zeroboxer (2015), is a Young Adult adventure set in a Space Opera universe with Faster Than Light travel, whose young protagonist, a professional athlete (see Games and Sports) whose gladiatorial entrepreneurial skills expose him to a larger world ...
Looker
Film (1981). Ladd Co/Warner Bros. Directed by Michael Crichton. Written by Crichton. Cast includes James Coburn, Susan Dey, Albert Finney and Leigh Taylor-Young. 94 minutes cut to 90 minutes. Colour. / Looker was intended by Crichton as a comedy, but the studio wanted a suspense thriller, and the result falls confusingly between the two. Three models, after having undergone surgery to make them even more beautiful, are murdered, and the ...
Mackenzie, Compton
(1883-1972) UK author, in active service during World War One, mostly in Scotland from around 1925; best known for his influential Bildungsroman, Sinister Street (1913-1914 2vols). He contributed several fantasies for younger readers to various issues of the ongoing Joy Street anthology series between 1923 and 1936, assembling earlier contributions as Told (coll 1930) [for details of later stories see Checklist]. ...
Zweig, Stefan
(1881-1942) Austrian biographer, journalist, playwright and author whose interbellum reputation is now unfairly faded; his Suicide (along with his wife's), which occurred when they both had begun to think World War Two would be won by the Allies, has been treated in hindsight as a sign of misplaced despair rather than – as clearly demonstrated in ...
Smith, Mitchell
(1935- ) US author who has also written Westerns as by Roy LeBeau; in his early career he was best-known for crime novels, of which Reprisal (1999) is of some interest, hinting at Horror in SF. Of sf interest is his later Snowfall sequence comprising Snowfall (2002), Kingdom River (2003) and Moonrise (2004), set in 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 ...