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Tuesday 24 June 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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High Concept
Item of critical Terminology coined in the later twentieth century to cover works, usually in Cinema and Television, that are easily summarized by a single-sentence – even a single-phrase – premise or pitch. More recently in the 2020s, the term has been increasingly adopted as a label to describe fiction by authors whose narratives are shaped by a strong foregrounded premise: a definition ...
Tanner, Charles R
(1896-1974) US clerk, salesman and author best known for his series featuring Tumithak, which began with "Tumithak of the Corridors" (January 1932 Amazing). Set in the fifty-third century, two millennia after Earth has been invaded by the shelks from Venus and mankind has been driven underground into a maze of deep tunnels. In that period humans have forgotten most of their previous advanced science. Tumithak, a young man, determines ...
Strick, Philip
(1939-2006) UK sf and film critic, anthologist, teacher, and director of a film library. In 1969 he initiated one of the first adult evening classes in sf in the UK, sponsored by the University of London at the City Literary Institute (see SF in the Classroom), which continued until 1992 under various tutors including John Clute, Colin Greenland, Peter ...
Twilight's Last Gleaming
Film (1977; vt Nuclear Countdown). Geria Productions/Hemdale. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Written by Ronald M Cohen, Edward Huebsch, based on Viper Three by Walter Wager. Cast includes Melvyn Douglas, Charles Durning, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark and Paul Winfield. 146 minutes (cut to 122 minutes). Colour. / In this borderline-sf movie, set in 1981, escaped military prisoners headed by a renegade US general take over a nuclear ICBM ...
Cash, Steve
(1946-2019) US country rock musician – he was lead singer for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils from its founding in 1972 – and author of The Meq sequence of sf novels, beginning with The Meq (dated 2003 but 2002), which describe, in fantasy-tinged diction, the lives of a kind of Pariah Elite which has hidden itself since time immemorial in the Basque lands of northern Spain. Meqs remain pre-adolescent until (at sight) they recognize ...
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 ...