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Monday 14 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 14 July 2025
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Spooks!
Short US film (1953). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Jules White. Written by Felix Adler. Cast includes Steve Calvert, Larry Fine, Moe Howard, Shemp Howard, Tom Kennedy, Norma Randall and Philip Van Zandt. 16 minutes. Black and white. / The Three Stooges (at the time, Fine, Moe Howard, and Shemp Howard) are private detectives (see Crime and Punishment) hired to find a missing woman. They disguise themselves as pie salesmen and go from door to ...
Barrowcliffe, Mark
(1964- ) UK author who also writes as by Mark Alder and as by M D Lachlan. His early novels, beginning with Girlfriend 44 (2000) and all under his own name, are nonfantastic, though The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing up Strange (2007) is an amusing memoir, focusing on his adolescent obsession with the Role Playing Game Dungeons & Dragons. / Most of Barrowcliffe's pseudonymous ...
Seymour, Alan [2]
(1927-2015) Australian playwright, broadcaster and author, resident in the UK and elsewhere between 1961 and 1995. His sf novel, The Coming Self-Destruction of the United States of America (1969) – presented as a series of manuscripts found ages hence in the ruins of America (see Ruins and Futurity) and delivered back through time for contemporary readers – features a Black revolution that, though temporarily successful, ...
Top o Nerae
["Aim for the Top"]. Animated video series (1988 Japan; vt Gunbuster, 1990 US). Gainax, Bandai Emotion. Directed by Hideaki Anno. Written by Hideaki Anno and Toshio Okada. Cast includes Noriko Hidaka, Maria Kawamura, Rei Sakuma and Norio Wakamoto. 180 minutes (6 x 30 minutes). Five episodes colour, last episode mainly black and white. / A Future War Anime in which the teenage Noriko ...
Maruyama Kugane
(? - ) Pen-name of a Japanese author, whose works, as by "Puririn Muchimuchi" until 2012, first appeared as online serials before migrating to the semi-pro Shōsetsuka ni Narō website for Light Novels, and ultimately to print in a path to publication mirroring that of other 2010s successes such as Gengen Kusano and Mamare ...
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 ...